August 3, 2016
This is (mostly) my side of a private conversation with a very awesome person, one of those good people I mentioned, helping me figure out my own brain and feelings by just listening…
Hi. Bit of an odd request. I'm wading through some of that life shit, and was hoping to get some guidance – you’re pretty well the only person I know who gets out that deep on a regular basis. I'm oddly not in a bad spot, but in a new spot. I don't know where the spot is. Do you mind if I tap your brain for some insight?
There's a lot going on. The situation is bad, but the diamonds showing up from it are amazing. I'm ok. I just have no idea how to handle a very intense meditation yesterday. I feel better than ever, and terrified about it. I'm stuck at work until 5:00pm, but will probably have time tonight to write everything out.
It's been a roller coaster the past couple years. You already have the back story on my family being toxic - bullying older brother and crappy parents. I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't even talking to my brother back when we were working together. That relationship rebuilt on a healthier foundation – it’s not great but we visit each other on purpose. I had a really bad abusive relationship up here in Edmonton, left that without the means to even afford living in the condo I owned so moving into my best friend's unfinished basement. (She's one of those amazing people who made me believe in me – now living in BC.)
Post crappy man, enter amazing one. Andrew had the misfortune of an Angel complex, bless him many times, and the universe decided we were the right people for each other and our first daughter made herself known eight months after we met, born nine months later. Not on purpose, but definitely a beautiful accident.
At that point, my parents became less toxic. I actually believed that I'd made it to ‘that’ status, you know the one – where parents and kids get equal, everyone's an adult. My brother's wedding, just before our daughter's second birthday, really changed that perspective. I overlooked a lot, I grew up treated badly so didn't really see it, but Andrew did a lot of "WTF?".... and talking about the situations after, there were a lot of "oooohhhhh" moments for me. Then we got pregnant with daughter number two, and brother's wife was pregnant with their first two months later. My pregnancy was a second awesome time – healthy happy mom and baby. Sister in law had a really rough go. Suddenly, I have no idea what it's like to be pregnant.
My parents came to stay with us for two weeks when daughter number two was born... it was bad. They were mean, dismissive, outright rude to Andrew, and decided to have a "family" dinner the day I came home from the hospital. Dad was supposed to cook, but was pissy about I don't know what slight or insult because he wasn't alpha male in my husband's house. So, twenty-six hours after the birth of our second, Andrew – who slept none for two nights because his wife was having a baby – and I made a roast beef dinner for my parents, and my brother and sister in law who my parents invited without asking, and Andrew's folks (who I invited because "!!family" dinner). Leah was 9 lbs 10 ozs at birth. I was released from the hospital with readmission paperwork already complete and signed as I was high risk for hemorrhaging.
After my parents left the next day, Andrew and I talked a lot. A few days later, daughter number one asked if I would still love her if she did something I didn't personally agree with – my parents had head-gamed her like they used to do to me. A few days after that, over the phone, my mom called us bad parents. My sister in law had a bad birth experience. Suddenly, I have no idea about childbirth. Three months later, in the span of a couple months, both my brother and my mom separately asked me "How would you know?" in regards to something parenting.
So, Andrew and I decide my parents are no longer welcome to stay at our house. Ever. If they visit, we supervise their time with the girls heavily. I limit talking to them to once a week phone calls. Life gets exponentially better.
Side note: his mom helped make dinner and almost threw my folks out of my house for leaving us to make dinner for them, after they planned the dinner. She got an ‘awesome’ star in my book.
Needless to say, the past six months, I've been working toward the logical, healthy conclusion of removing my parents from my world. So hard to do, but I’m getting to the understanding that it’s so worth it. However, the craving for acceptance never goes away... so the decision gets made to just live with that. And hope maybe one day......... then in May dad gets diagnosed stage 4 cancer. I haven't told them to P.F.O. yet, and now I can't. Boned. I am totally boned.
So, the only option is to suck it up and try to be the good daughter. But I'm not. I don't like them. I'm sick of my brother needing to be needy because there's more focus on dad than on him. I'm done with my parents being shitty, toxic humans. I'm still so angry that they tried to pull the same abusive, mean head-games on my daughter that they did on me. I've just been trapped these past couple of months.
I've taken advantage of the family services at work and the lady I spoke to helped a lot that it really isn't me, I'm a co-dependant raised in a narcissistic family. It happens. I have great people around me now, with the exception of my brother and parents. Much stress and anxiety was had by me. So, my husband and I make a date yesterday to go to and have a float. We've been once before and really enjoyed it; the meditation is so clear. I did a bit of fasting in the day the first time, so did that again yesterday.
I couldn't focus at first, so just treated it like a tarot reading – I do the cards myself – and let my mind wander for whatever it is that I need to know. I've done a few guided meditations the past few months, and taken up the meditating habit myself again, and it's been really helping. So, when I saw the little, dropping ball like in one of my favorite guided meditations, I just relaxed into it.
The little dot turned into a little bird. It was really pretty – bright white swooping and spiraling on the black background. Then the bird got closer, and I realized it's not a little bird at all. Then I realized it's diving for me. At my face. Talons first.
I came out of the meditation at that point – obviously – but figured if something needs to get through to me to the point of attacking my face, I should get back to it. Deep breaths, and I'm back at the point of bird-of-prey talons the size of my hand about an inch from my right eye.
The instant the talons gouged my face, a migraine followed. Intensely. The bird clawed at me, determined, one set of talons gripping my right shoulder as the other tore at my face. Every time I came out of the meditation to catch my breath, I went back in at the exact moment that I’d come out. Time stopped if I wasn’t there. I don’t know how long it took in real time, but it felt like not a short span, until it dropped its head and dug out a perfect sphere of bad.
The instant the sphere was out, the migraine went with it. The bird then nested in over me. And, my friend, I've never felt so loved in all my life. I could feel the feathers on my skin, the protection, as I was drifting around in the sea. I came out of the meditation and sat up and cried pretty hard at that point (ugly crying, with snot and sobbing and everything). When I went back to the meditation, I was still nested in and safe under the bird, but now time was passing there when I was out of it, and I was now also drifting near a raft. On the raft was me, as a child. Small, hurt and rejected. So I held out my left hand and took her small hand in mine, and brought her onto me. All that love that had been given to me transferred to include her. Suddenly, that little girl I always rejected because she was always rejected just became part of me, same and same, and safe and sound with our bird-of-prey momma. Loved.
I came out of the float pod someone different than went in. They have showers in the rooms, so I did a cleanse shower, cried more, and just feel complete now. I don't have any need of, or hope for, getting that kind of love from outside me anymore. It's beautiful! I'm so me – all of me – and I'm good.
Best ninety minutes in history!
But, the experience left me raw, exposed. Still safe. Even tonight, I can still feel the feathers, and there's a hole in my energy where the sphere of bad was. I keep touching my forehead today because the hole feels physically there. As well, the skin that got "gouged" feels tight and numb – like a healed scar – and it tingles nearly all the time.
I think I went through a lot more than a meditation. I'm pretty shell-shocked and happy, but I don't know how to close out the breakthrough... I just keep crying and feeling great. That's where I'm asking you – do you know how to honor this, finish the ritual? If it's just crying for a while and random bursts of love and happy, I'll survive, but I feel like I'm missing a finishing component. I've never heard of this stuff outside of native cultures – and you do a lot of it in the most awesome, healthy ways.
If you have any insight, pointers, or advice, I'd love to hear it.
Thank you so much for letting me share this with you!
I'm going back over your experience. I wonder if you truly realize the courage it takes to allow a vision like that to manifest as deeply as it did? That happened because you are serious about seeking your own healing, and especially about breaking the generational patterns of dysfunction and abuse. That is fucking magnificent.
It's bloody brilliant, too! You'd be amazed at the change in me between Monday this week and today. One of the lovely ladies I work with was just saying I look so much lighter. It's amazing, the night terrors I had as a small child, I now remember them as waking up to ‘me now’ taking care of ‘me then’, and that momma bird taking care of both of us. I'm not scared of the nightmares anymore.
As of August 6, I still feel like there’s a gap in my forehead. I have to keep touching it to be sure that it’s all there! As well, I started having doubt that this ‘complete’ feeling I’ve had since Wednesday would be permanent, and the ‘scar’ started to tingle fiercely. As soon as the doubt fizzled, the tingling stopped. Guess this is permanent. Am I supposed to be this happy that an eagle ripped open my skull??
This is (mostly) my side of a private conversation with a very awesome person, one of those good people I mentioned, helping me figure out my own brain and feelings by just listening…
Hi. Bit of an odd request. I'm wading through some of that life shit, and was hoping to get some guidance – you’re pretty well the only person I know who gets out that deep on a regular basis. I'm oddly not in a bad spot, but in a new spot. I don't know where the spot is. Do you mind if I tap your brain for some insight?
There's a lot going on. The situation is bad, but the diamonds showing up from it are amazing. I'm ok. I just have no idea how to handle a very intense meditation yesterday. I feel better than ever, and terrified about it. I'm stuck at work until 5:00pm, but will probably have time tonight to write everything out.
It's been a roller coaster the past couple years. You already have the back story on my family being toxic - bullying older brother and crappy parents. I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't even talking to my brother back when we were working together. That relationship rebuilt on a healthier foundation – it’s not great but we visit each other on purpose. I had a really bad abusive relationship up here in Edmonton, left that without the means to even afford living in the condo I owned so moving into my best friend's unfinished basement. (She's one of those amazing people who made me believe in me – now living in BC.)
Post crappy man, enter amazing one. Andrew had the misfortune of an Angel complex, bless him many times, and the universe decided we were the right people for each other and our first daughter made herself known eight months after we met, born nine months later. Not on purpose, but definitely a beautiful accident.
At that point, my parents became less toxic. I actually believed that I'd made it to ‘that’ status, you know the one – where parents and kids get equal, everyone's an adult. My brother's wedding, just before our daughter's second birthday, really changed that perspective. I overlooked a lot, I grew up treated badly so didn't really see it, but Andrew did a lot of "WTF?".... and talking about the situations after, there were a lot of "oooohhhhh" moments for me. Then we got pregnant with daughter number two, and brother's wife was pregnant with their first two months later. My pregnancy was a second awesome time – healthy happy mom and baby. Sister in law had a really rough go. Suddenly, I have no idea what it's like to be pregnant.
My parents came to stay with us for two weeks when daughter number two was born... it was bad. They were mean, dismissive, outright rude to Andrew, and decided to have a "family" dinner the day I came home from the hospital. Dad was supposed to cook, but was pissy about I don't know what slight or insult because he wasn't alpha male in my husband's house. So, twenty-six hours after the birth of our second, Andrew – who slept none for two nights because his wife was having a baby – and I made a roast beef dinner for my parents, and my brother and sister in law who my parents invited without asking, and Andrew's folks (who I invited because "!!family" dinner). Leah was 9 lbs 10 ozs at birth. I was released from the hospital with readmission paperwork already complete and signed as I was high risk for hemorrhaging.
After my parents left the next day, Andrew and I talked a lot. A few days later, daughter number one asked if I would still love her if she did something I didn't personally agree with – my parents had head-gamed her like they used to do to me. A few days after that, over the phone, my mom called us bad parents. My sister in law had a bad birth experience. Suddenly, I have no idea about childbirth. Three months later, in the span of a couple months, both my brother and my mom separately asked me "How would you know?" in regards to something parenting.
So, Andrew and I decide my parents are no longer welcome to stay at our house. Ever. If they visit, we supervise their time with the girls heavily. I limit talking to them to once a week phone calls. Life gets exponentially better.
Side note: his mom helped make dinner and almost threw my folks out of my house for leaving us to make dinner for them, after they planned the dinner. She got an ‘awesome’ star in my book.
Needless to say, the past six months, I've been working toward the logical, healthy conclusion of removing my parents from my world. So hard to do, but I’m getting to the understanding that it’s so worth it. However, the craving for acceptance never goes away... so the decision gets made to just live with that. And hope maybe one day......... then in May dad gets diagnosed stage 4 cancer. I haven't told them to P.F.O. yet, and now I can't. Boned. I am totally boned.
So, the only option is to suck it up and try to be the good daughter. But I'm not. I don't like them. I'm sick of my brother needing to be needy because there's more focus on dad than on him. I'm done with my parents being shitty, toxic humans. I'm still so angry that they tried to pull the same abusive, mean head-games on my daughter that they did on me. I've just been trapped these past couple of months.
I've taken advantage of the family services at work and the lady I spoke to helped a lot that it really isn't me, I'm a co-dependant raised in a narcissistic family. It happens. I have great people around me now, with the exception of my brother and parents. Much stress and anxiety was had by me. So, my husband and I make a date yesterday to go to and have a float. We've been once before and really enjoyed it; the meditation is so clear. I did a bit of fasting in the day the first time, so did that again yesterday.
I couldn't focus at first, so just treated it like a tarot reading – I do the cards myself – and let my mind wander for whatever it is that I need to know. I've done a few guided meditations the past few months, and taken up the meditating habit myself again, and it's been really helping. So, when I saw the little, dropping ball like in one of my favorite guided meditations, I just relaxed into it.
The little dot turned into a little bird. It was really pretty – bright white swooping and spiraling on the black background. Then the bird got closer, and I realized it's not a little bird at all. Then I realized it's diving for me. At my face. Talons first.
I came out of the meditation at that point – obviously – but figured if something needs to get through to me to the point of attacking my face, I should get back to it. Deep breaths, and I'm back at the point of bird-of-prey talons the size of my hand about an inch from my right eye.
The instant the talons gouged my face, a migraine followed. Intensely. The bird clawed at me, determined, one set of talons gripping my right shoulder as the other tore at my face. Every time I came out of the meditation to catch my breath, I went back in at the exact moment that I’d come out. Time stopped if I wasn’t there. I don’t know how long it took in real time, but it felt like not a short span, until it dropped its head and dug out a perfect sphere of bad.
The instant the sphere was out, the migraine went with it. The bird then nested in over me. And, my friend, I've never felt so loved in all my life. I could feel the feathers on my skin, the protection, as I was drifting around in the sea. I came out of the meditation and sat up and cried pretty hard at that point (ugly crying, with snot and sobbing and everything). When I went back to the meditation, I was still nested in and safe under the bird, but now time was passing there when I was out of it, and I was now also drifting near a raft. On the raft was me, as a child. Small, hurt and rejected. So I held out my left hand and took her small hand in mine, and brought her onto me. All that love that had been given to me transferred to include her. Suddenly, that little girl I always rejected because she was always rejected just became part of me, same and same, and safe and sound with our bird-of-prey momma. Loved.
I came out of the float pod someone different than went in. They have showers in the rooms, so I did a cleanse shower, cried more, and just feel complete now. I don't have any need of, or hope for, getting that kind of love from outside me anymore. It's beautiful! I'm so me – all of me – and I'm good.
Best ninety minutes in history!
But, the experience left me raw, exposed. Still safe. Even tonight, I can still feel the feathers, and there's a hole in my energy where the sphere of bad was. I keep touching my forehead today because the hole feels physically there. As well, the skin that got "gouged" feels tight and numb – like a healed scar – and it tingles nearly all the time.
I think I went through a lot more than a meditation. I'm pretty shell-shocked and happy, but I don't know how to close out the breakthrough... I just keep crying and feeling great. That's where I'm asking you – do you know how to honor this, finish the ritual? If it's just crying for a while and random bursts of love and happy, I'll survive, but I feel like I'm missing a finishing component. I've never heard of this stuff outside of native cultures – and you do a lot of it in the most awesome, healthy ways.
If you have any insight, pointers, or advice, I'd love to hear it.
Thank you so much for letting me share this with you!
I'm going back over your experience. I wonder if you truly realize the courage it takes to allow a vision like that to manifest as deeply as it did? That happened because you are serious about seeking your own healing, and especially about breaking the generational patterns of dysfunction and abuse. That is fucking magnificent.
It's bloody brilliant, too! You'd be amazed at the change in me between Monday this week and today. One of the lovely ladies I work with was just saying I look so much lighter. It's amazing, the night terrors I had as a small child, I now remember them as waking up to ‘me now’ taking care of ‘me then’, and that momma bird taking care of both of us. I'm not scared of the nightmares anymore.
As of August 6, I still feel like there’s a gap in my forehead. I have to keep touching it to be sure that it’s all there! As well, I started having doubt that this ‘complete’ feeling I’ve had since Wednesday would be permanent, and the ‘scar’ started to tingle fiercely. As soon as the doubt fizzled, the tingling stopped. Guess this is permanent. Am I supposed to be this happy that an eagle ripped open my skull??
October 22, 2016
This is a letter to my parents, included as an attachment to an email so they had the option of reading it or not. To their credit, they did.
I don’t have a good way of approaching this. I’ve been looking for one for years, and have yet to come up with a direction of approach that will, in some small way, be less disregarding than how I’ve often been treated. I can’t come up with a way.
I’m simply reduced to the tools I have to work with.
Do you remember that time I broke a rib and dislocated my shoulder? I was twelve. I was seven when I broke my big toe on my right foot. I was twelve when I broke my right wrist, and seventeen when I ripped out the tendon on top of my left foot that holds my baby toe from curling under my foot. I broke my nose and dislocated two other toes when I was seventeen as well.
The broken wrist you probably remember because I had to get a cast…after a week of not even being excused from gym class because I had to “get over myself and quit whining”. I doubt you remember any of the other injuries because when I was seven you told me “it’s not broken, stop overreacting with that stupid limp and quit whining” (I had x-rays done on my foot in my twenties for another injury, the toe never healed straight), and by the time I broke a rib and dislocated my shoulder I’d already learned that I was “just complaining for attention” so didn’t tell you. The family Chiropractor set my shoulder for me and told me how to take care of the rib so it would heal okay. It did.
I’ve suffered from migraines – quite severely – since the age of eleven with pain to the point of vomiting and going into shock. Due to my “low pain tolerance” and “whining for attention”, though, this was never treated with anything more than aspirin. I was eleven when my scoliosis started causing regular back pain as well.
The tendonitis in both my wrists has led to approximately 60% of use in both hands on the good days for my entire adult life to date, and has caused chronic pain since the age of twelve. Again, though, because I was “only complaining for the attention” and had to “get over myself”, I doubt you actually noticed that I was dealing with this issue. Or, rather, was dealing very badly with this issue and ended up suicidally depressed by the age of fifteen. I did approach you one time, crying, and told you that I needed help and wanted to talk to a professional. You gave me a hug and asked me to tell you what was wrong. I couldn’t. So you patted my shoulder and told me that if I couldn’t talk to you then it wasn’t that important. And then you walked away.
I have very few examples of happy memories from when I was young. My brother was a constant torment, who was allowed to be because “he has it so hard”, and I was bullied at home and at school by him. I was villainized and punished for standing up for myself at home, so I didn’t try at school. The four years of not speaking to him was a direct result, and I still wonder if it was enough.
I developed an eating disorder and pain-killer addiction in my late teens. The addiction only lasted for around six months, and the withdrawl symptoms were only a week or so. The malnutrition caused by the eating disorder stopped my periods for three months when I was eighteen, and the unhealthy relationship with food followed me into my twenties. You often complained about how expensive it was to feed everyone, and would show and voice utter disgust if I took seconds. So I stopped taking seconds. The amount I ate in a day tripled when I moved out of your house.
I say your house because you made it very clear during the Christmas break in my first year and again during the summer I was working at Alcan that I was not welcome, not wanted, and not allowed to come back. It was a truly horrible feeling at the end of my second year at SAIT to realize that I was homeless as of the date I was scheduled to move out of my residence apartment. I don’t wish that feeling on anyone.
The then-friend that I moved in with was mentally abusive. You had established a pattern for my life whereby I would make a choice or a statement, and you would tell me I was wrong:
- I’m hurt – no you’re not, quit whining
- I want to do this – no you don’t
- I feel this way – no you don’t
It was a pattern that devalued my worth as a human to nothing and ensured that you always were able to be “right”. She perpetuated this pattern, and then added further stipulations:
- I’m smart – but not as smart as me
- I’m pretty – but not as pretty as me
Etc, etc, etc. At nearly every turning up until the age of 24, the people living with me in their houses undermined and destroyed my personal worth. I held no value on myself, so was easy for others to take advantage of and abuse.
At my first job, I was raped by a coworker. Two months later, working with him every day, I was sent to an isolated jobsite with him as part of the crew. The project manager threatened me with physical harm if I argued with him about professional ethics. I stayed on that jobsite for two months, working beside my rapist for someone who threatened to beat me. When I walked off the jobsite, and then another eleven kilometers to the nearest main road, the only person I could get a hold of to tell that I was doing it was one of my subcontractors, and he agreed to stay at the office until I called him again, or to call the police that night by 8 pm if I didn’t call him. I was lucky and hitch-hiked a ride to the intersection of Highway 2 and Highway 1 on the east side of Calgary. I then walked to SAIT’s campus on the west side because I still knew some of the security guards there and figured they would let me use a phone. They did, and I called my subcontractor to let him know I was safe. My abusive roommate picked me up from SAIT, ten minutes from where I was living, and berated me for causing her inconvenience because she’d had plans and was now late.
I called you to tell you what had happened, but made the mistake of opening the conversation with telling you that I’d walked off the jobsite. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget what you interrupted me to say: “I can’t believe you did that to your employer,” you said. “Who do you think you are to leave them in the lurch like that? You’re a failure and a quitter. I’m so disappointed in you. I’m too angry to even talk to you about this right now,” you said. And then you hung up on me.
After a lifetime of not having value, and for once taking a stand on believing that I shouldn’t have to be abused, you told me that. I spiraled into depression and self-harm. Even after finding a new job and starting to recover, my abusive roommate ensured to remind me a minimum of daily that I was unreliable and inconvenient – per your words – because then she could easily be better than someone. It was the same bullying pattern that my brother used. Not knowing any better because I had never been shown any different, I let her treat me like this.
When she moved out, my life improved, and I even started dating. My first choice was not a good one, and I was lucky that he knew that as an alcoholic he wasn’t a good choice. In hind sight, he wasn’t bad, and the on-again off-again quazy-romance lasted about a year. My second choice only lasted six months. He raped me multiple times. You made fun of me for being easy to manipulate because he wanted me to dress and act differently, and you thought I was silly for having humored him for as long as I did. I didn’t try to talk to you about him because of that.
Moving to Edmonton was a good decision for me. Moving in with the people I did was not. She broke half of my things, on purpose, so she could get them out of her garage. I stayed friends with them for as long as I did after moving out because I loved their son. He grew up, though, and I didn’t need to keep them in my life.
My third choice was not a good person in my life. He was mentally and emotionally abusive, and blamed me for being difficult when he raped me. He nearly destroyed me financially, in that I had approximately $5000 of credit and over $275,000 in direct debt. When I did leave him, it was survival. I was suicidal, I was not sleeping due to the stress-induced night terrors, and didn’t have the funds to afford living in my own condo so moved in with Chris and Mike because I had no other place to go. Living mostly in camp was a saving grace because of the routines, but every days-off was a living nightmare until I finally collected the last of the few possessions I still owned and escaped in early November. Darryl and Jean are amazing people, as are Chris and Mike, as are Donna and Daniel. These three couples are my only reason for still being alive today.
When I came to your house for Christmas break a month later, I actually made the mistake of believing that you meant what you said over the phone and that I could come back and be safe at your house. When I tried to talk to you about the things that happened, though, you cut me off. “It takes two people to have a relationship, and two people to make it fail,” you said. You didn’t even have the decency to hold my hand when you said it. So I came back to Alberta. I have been plagued by anxiety and panic attacks since that winter due to the trauma of the abuse, to the point that I questioned my ability to hold a regular job. I’ve lost multiple memories from the two years leading up to that winter, and cannot to this day explain any details from that time in a chronological order.
I thank the Universe every day for Andrew. I never knew that people like him were real, and the solid foundation he’s helped me build under myself is second-to-none. The constant disregard, disrespect and outward rudeness you continually give him is unwarranted and unwelcome. I saw it at my wedding, but blew it off as you just being you, that’s how you are. It was disgustingly obvious at my brother’s wedding when you looked me in the eye and said “a person can do something for twenty years and still be bad at it” about Andrew’s public speaking skills, which we’d repeatedly confirmed as excellent. I cannot, however, forget what you did when coming out to help when I had my second daughter.
For two weeks, you complained about being in my home. You were disrespectful and condescending to my husband in his home. When I went into the hospital, you were cruel to my then 3-year-old daughter in the same level of neglectfully disregarding head-games that you forced on me as a child, and she spent a solid eighteen months questioning if love was conditional after you left. You hurt my child. To top it off, twenty-six hours after giving birth, with hospital readmission paperwork in my purse and under orders from the hospital staff not to remove my bracelet because I was high risk to hemorrhage in the way that still kills women in developed countries, I had the privilege of making you – and the guests you invited into my home without asking – a roast beef dinner. You didn’t help because you were too busy being bitchy that my husband, the person who attempts to plan things, asked you what you wanted to order for the dinner that you told him you were hosting. That made you angry, so when he offered a roast from the freezer you walked out and he took out the roast to thaw. You then had a fit that I didn’t know how to cook a roast, so didn’t know what pan you needed, and you walked away. My husband and I spent the following five hours cooking, serving, and cleaning up after you and your guests, none of whom lifted a finger to help, and you only offered when you saw that I’d been crying. “You don’t have to do everything yourself, you know,” you said. You hurt me.
That night I understood that you are not welcome in my home anymore.
A week later you had the audacity to accuse Andrew and I of being bad parents in a phone call because we let our then three-year-old believe in fairy tales.
I made the decisions in those following weeks to limit the time you spend talking with my children, and that you are not allowed to visit with them in person if Andrew or I are not there.
That decision was reinforced when, about a month after my nephew was born, you asked me “How would you know?” about a parenting topic. You’d already started to marginalize my daughters because your son had a son.
When I had my hysterectomy, I was very lucky to have an aunt who loves children that was not working and able to stay for two weeks while I recovered. My surgery was for pre-cancer. In the entire time that I was dealing with options and plans in the case of having the aggressive cancer that was identified, and I lived under the threat of, for a total of seven of my second daughter’s first eight months of life, and coping with possibly not seeing my kids grow up, do you know that you never called me once about it? You responded if I brought it up, but you never offered help or support, and you never bothered to ask about test results. You actively, passive-aggressively berated me for asking my aunt – your sister – to come out and help post-surgery, but never called to see how the surgery went or if I was recovering okay. I called you eleven days later to tell you. You asked me if my aunt had gone over to see my nephew.
Since then, the reduced number of phone calls and visits with you and with my brother have improved my mental state in increasingly large steps. Although I still have anxiety, I rarely have panic attacks. I’ve become confident in my ability to work a full-time job again. I published a book. All of it without you undermining what I’m doing at every turn under a thin veil of offering passive-aggressive support. I’m a person, fully human, and I do the things that interest and support me and my family, and your opinions and feelings of that have stopped being factors in my life that have to be considered.
I don’t wish this news and subsequent restrictions on any parent or grandparent, but I’m tired of being treated – by you – like the sub-human you tried to raise me to be. I’m enraged at your continued attempts to treat my husband and children in kind. My opinions, feelings and physical well-being have a lot of value, and I have a lot that I offer to the world by being in it. My husband and my daughters have even more. As you are not supportive of this, and often in the past have been opposed, I’m now in the familiar position of having to choose your continued comfort over my well-being. What has changed in the past few years is that your comfort must be at the expense of not me, but my family, my children. It’s not really much of a choice. I will not allow you to hurt them again.
This is news that comes at a worse than bad time in your world. I made hard attempts to be whatever it is that society expects in these terminal health situations because I do love you. Unfortunately, love isn’t enough. Especially when it has been riddled with conditions and stipulations and subject to change without notice for a lifetime, love stops far short of being enough. Facing your own mortality is not an easy thing the first time, as well, and it takes as long as it takes to try and come to grips with. I’ve been walking beside my own mortality for a while, and it took months to understand at sixteen so I can only imagine the difficulty of facing it in your sixties.
In the weeks prior to your visit out here for Thanksgiving, I’ve been undergoing a major shift in my life. You haven’t noticed due to your own circumstances, and that’s understandable considering the magnitude of your circumstances, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
If your opinions don’t align with mine, and it’s a problem, it’s your problem. If you don’t like how I parent, it’s your problem. If you don’t like my job or if I change jobs, it’s your problem. If you don’t like where I live or how I live in my own home, it’s your problem. If you try to make it my problem anymore, or try to make it a problem for my family, that behavior will not be tolerated. I will hang up on you if I am talking to you on the phone, as you’ve hung up on me, and I will walk away from you if you act badly toward me in person, as you’ve walked away from me. If you treat my children badly, I will remove you from their lives completely. End, stop. This is not something I want to do, but if you threaten the well-being of my children, their confidence or worth again, I will remove you from their lives completely. Without question, I’d take on a bear attacking them as well.
This is a letter to my parents, included as an attachment to an email so they had the option of reading it or not. To their credit, they did.
I don’t have a good way of approaching this. I’ve been looking for one for years, and have yet to come up with a direction of approach that will, in some small way, be less disregarding than how I’ve often been treated. I can’t come up with a way.
I’m simply reduced to the tools I have to work with.
Do you remember that time I broke a rib and dislocated my shoulder? I was twelve. I was seven when I broke my big toe on my right foot. I was twelve when I broke my right wrist, and seventeen when I ripped out the tendon on top of my left foot that holds my baby toe from curling under my foot. I broke my nose and dislocated two other toes when I was seventeen as well.
The broken wrist you probably remember because I had to get a cast…after a week of not even being excused from gym class because I had to “get over myself and quit whining”. I doubt you remember any of the other injuries because when I was seven you told me “it’s not broken, stop overreacting with that stupid limp and quit whining” (I had x-rays done on my foot in my twenties for another injury, the toe never healed straight), and by the time I broke a rib and dislocated my shoulder I’d already learned that I was “just complaining for attention” so didn’t tell you. The family Chiropractor set my shoulder for me and told me how to take care of the rib so it would heal okay. It did.
I’ve suffered from migraines – quite severely – since the age of eleven with pain to the point of vomiting and going into shock. Due to my “low pain tolerance” and “whining for attention”, though, this was never treated with anything more than aspirin. I was eleven when my scoliosis started causing regular back pain as well.
The tendonitis in both my wrists has led to approximately 60% of use in both hands on the good days for my entire adult life to date, and has caused chronic pain since the age of twelve. Again, though, because I was “only complaining for the attention” and had to “get over myself”, I doubt you actually noticed that I was dealing with this issue. Or, rather, was dealing very badly with this issue and ended up suicidally depressed by the age of fifteen. I did approach you one time, crying, and told you that I needed help and wanted to talk to a professional. You gave me a hug and asked me to tell you what was wrong. I couldn’t. So you patted my shoulder and told me that if I couldn’t talk to you then it wasn’t that important. And then you walked away.
I have very few examples of happy memories from when I was young. My brother was a constant torment, who was allowed to be because “he has it so hard”, and I was bullied at home and at school by him. I was villainized and punished for standing up for myself at home, so I didn’t try at school. The four years of not speaking to him was a direct result, and I still wonder if it was enough.
I developed an eating disorder and pain-killer addiction in my late teens. The addiction only lasted for around six months, and the withdrawl symptoms were only a week or so. The malnutrition caused by the eating disorder stopped my periods for three months when I was eighteen, and the unhealthy relationship with food followed me into my twenties. You often complained about how expensive it was to feed everyone, and would show and voice utter disgust if I took seconds. So I stopped taking seconds. The amount I ate in a day tripled when I moved out of your house.
I say your house because you made it very clear during the Christmas break in my first year and again during the summer I was working at Alcan that I was not welcome, not wanted, and not allowed to come back. It was a truly horrible feeling at the end of my second year at SAIT to realize that I was homeless as of the date I was scheduled to move out of my residence apartment. I don’t wish that feeling on anyone.
The then-friend that I moved in with was mentally abusive. You had established a pattern for my life whereby I would make a choice or a statement, and you would tell me I was wrong:
- I’m hurt – no you’re not, quit whining
- I want to do this – no you don’t
- I feel this way – no you don’t
It was a pattern that devalued my worth as a human to nothing and ensured that you always were able to be “right”. She perpetuated this pattern, and then added further stipulations:
- I’m smart – but not as smart as me
- I’m pretty – but not as pretty as me
Etc, etc, etc. At nearly every turning up until the age of 24, the people living with me in their houses undermined and destroyed my personal worth. I held no value on myself, so was easy for others to take advantage of and abuse.
At my first job, I was raped by a coworker. Two months later, working with him every day, I was sent to an isolated jobsite with him as part of the crew. The project manager threatened me with physical harm if I argued with him about professional ethics. I stayed on that jobsite for two months, working beside my rapist for someone who threatened to beat me. When I walked off the jobsite, and then another eleven kilometers to the nearest main road, the only person I could get a hold of to tell that I was doing it was one of my subcontractors, and he agreed to stay at the office until I called him again, or to call the police that night by 8 pm if I didn’t call him. I was lucky and hitch-hiked a ride to the intersection of Highway 2 and Highway 1 on the east side of Calgary. I then walked to SAIT’s campus on the west side because I still knew some of the security guards there and figured they would let me use a phone. They did, and I called my subcontractor to let him know I was safe. My abusive roommate picked me up from SAIT, ten minutes from where I was living, and berated me for causing her inconvenience because she’d had plans and was now late.
I called you to tell you what had happened, but made the mistake of opening the conversation with telling you that I’d walked off the jobsite. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget what you interrupted me to say: “I can’t believe you did that to your employer,” you said. “Who do you think you are to leave them in the lurch like that? You’re a failure and a quitter. I’m so disappointed in you. I’m too angry to even talk to you about this right now,” you said. And then you hung up on me.
After a lifetime of not having value, and for once taking a stand on believing that I shouldn’t have to be abused, you told me that. I spiraled into depression and self-harm. Even after finding a new job and starting to recover, my abusive roommate ensured to remind me a minimum of daily that I was unreliable and inconvenient – per your words – because then she could easily be better than someone. It was the same bullying pattern that my brother used. Not knowing any better because I had never been shown any different, I let her treat me like this.
When she moved out, my life improved, and I even started dating. My first choice was not a good one, and I was lucky that he knew that as an alcoholic he wasn’t a good choice. In hind sight, he wasn’t bad, and the on-again off-again quazy-romance lasted about a year. My second choice only lasted six months. He raped me multiple times. You made fun of me for being easy to manipulate because he wanted me to dress and act differently, and you thought I was silly for having humored him for as long as I did. I didn’t try to talk to you about him because of that.
Moving to Edmonton was a good decision for me. Moving in with the people I did was not. She broke half of my things, on purpose, so she could get them out of her garage. I stayed friends with them for as long as I did after moving out because I loved their son. He grew up, though, and I didn’t need to keep them in my life.
My third choice was not a good person in my life. He was mentally and emotionally abusive, and blamed me for being difficult when he raped me. He nearly destroyed me financially, in that I had approximately $5000 of credit and over $275,000 in direct debt. When I did leave him, it was survival. I was suicidal, I was not sleeping due to the stress-induced night terrors, and didn’t have the funds to afford living in my own condo so moved in with Chris and Mike because I had no other place to go. Living mostly in camp was a saving grace because of the routines, but every days-off was a living nightmare until I finally collected the last of the few possessions I still owned and escaped in early November. Darryl and Jean are amazing people, as are Chris and Mike, as are Donna and Daniel. These three couples are my only reason for still being alive today.
When I came to your house for Christmas break a month later, I actually made the mistake of believing that you meant what you said over the phone and that I could come back and be safe at your house. When I tried to talk to you about the things that happened, though, you cut me off. “It takes two people to have a relationship, and two people to make it fail,” you said. You didn’t even have the decency to hold my hand when you said it. So I came back to Alberta. I have been plagued by anxiety and panic attacks since that winter due to the trauma of the abuse, to the point that I questioned my ability to hold a regular job. I’ve lost multiple memories from the two years leading up to that winter, and cannot to this day explain any details from that time in a chronological order.
I thank the Universe every day for Andrew. I never knew that people like him were real, and the solid foundation he’s helped me build under myself is second-to-none. The constant disregard, disrespect and outward rudeness you continually give him is unwarranted and unwelcome. I saw it at my wedding, but blew it off as you just being you, that’s how you are. It was disgustingly obvious at my brother’s wedding when you looked me in the eye and said “a person can do something for twenty years and still be bad at it” about Andrew’s public speaking skills, which we’d repeatedly confirmed as excellent. I cannot, however, forget what you did when coming out to help when I had my second daughter.
For two weeks, you complained about being in my home. You were disrespectful and condescending to my husband in his home. When I went into the hospital, you were cruel to my then 3-year-old daughter in the same level of neglectfully disregarding head-games that you forced on me as a child, and she spent a solid eighteen months questioning if love was conditional after you left. You hurt my child. To top it off, twenty-six hours after giving birth, with hospital readmission paperwork in my purse and under orders from the hospital staff not to remove my bracelet because I was high risk to hemorrhage in the way that still kills women in developed countries, I had the privilege of making you – and the guests you invited into my home without asking – a roast beef dinner. You didn’t help because you were too busy being bitchy that my husband, the person who attempts to plan things, asked you what you wanted to order for the dinner that you told him you were hosting. That made you angry, so when he offered a roast from the freezer you walked out and he took out the roast to thaw. You then had a fit that I didn’t know how to cook a roast, so didn’t know what pan you needed, and you walked away. My husband and I spent the following five hours cooking, serving, and cleaning up after you and your guests, none of whom lifted a finger to help, and you only offered when you saw that I’d been crying. “You don’t have to do everything yourself, you know,” you said. You hurt me.
That night I understood that you are not welcome in my home anymore.
A week later you had the audacity to accuse Andrew and I of being bad parents in a phone call because we let our then three-year-old believe in fairy tales.
I made the decisions in those following weeks to limit the time you spend talking with my children, and that you are not allowed to visit with them in person if Andrew or I are not there.
That decision was reinforced when, about a month after my nephew was born, you asked me “How would you know?” about a parenting topic. You’d already started to marginalize my daughters because your son had a son.
When I had my hysterectomy, I was very lucky to have an aunt who loves children that was not working and able to stay for two weeks while I recovered. My surgery was for pre-cancer. In the entire time that I was dealing with options and plans in the case of having the aggressive cancer that was identified, and I lived under the threat of, for a total of seven of my second daughter’s first eight months of life, and coping with possibly not seeing my kids grow up, do you know that you never called me once about it? You responded if I brought it up, but you never offered help or support, and you never bothered to ask about test results. You actively, passive-aggressively berated me for asking my aunt – your sister – to come out and help post-surgery, but never called to see how the surgery went or if I was recovering okay. I called you eleven days later to tell you. You asked me if my aunt had gone over to see my nephew.
Since then, the reduced number of phone calls and visits with you and with my brother have improved my mental state in increasingly large steps. Although I still have anxiety, I rarely have panic attacks. I’ve become confident in my ability to work a full-time job again. I published a book. All of it without you undermining what I’m doing at every turn under a thin veil of offering passive-aggressive support. I’m a person, fully human, and I do the things that interest and support me and my family, and your opinions and feelings of that have stopped being factors in my life that have to be considered.
I don’t wish this news and subsequent restrictions on any parent or grandparent, but I’m tired of being treated – by you – like the sub-human you tried to raise me to be. I’m enraged at your continued attempts to treat my husband and children in kind. My opinions, feelings and physical well-being have a lot of value, and I have a lot that I offer to the world by being in it. My husband and my daughters have even more. As you are not supportive of this, and often in the past have been opposed, I’m now in the familiar position of having to choose your continued comfort over my well-being. What has changed in the past few years is that your comfort must be at the expense of not me, but my family, my children. It’s not really much of a choice. I will not allow you to hurt them again.
This is news that comes at a worse than bad time in your world. I made hard attempts to be whatever it is that society expects in these terminal health situations because I do love you. Unfortunately, love isn’t enough. Especially when it has been riddled with conditions and stipulations and subject to change without notice for a lifetime, love stops far short of being enough. Facing your own mortality is not an easy thing the first time, as well, and it takes as long as it takes to try and come to grips with. I’ve been walking beside my own mortality for a while, and it took months to understand at sixteen so I can only imagine the difficulty of facing it in your sixties.
In the weeks prior to your visit out here for Thanksgiving, I’ve been undergoing a major shift in my life. You haven’t noticed due to your own circumstances, and that’s understandable considering the magnitude of your circumstances, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
If your opinions don’t align with mine, and it’s a problem, it’s your problem. If you don’t like how I parent, it’s your problem. If you don’t like my job or if I change jobs, it’s your problem. If you don’t like where I live or how I live in my own home, it’s your problem. If you try to make it my problem anymore, or try to make it a problem for my family, that behavior will not be tolerated. I will hang up on you if I am talking to you on the phone, as you’ve hung up on me, and I will walk away from you if you act badly toward me in person, as you’ve walked away from me. If you treat my children badly, I will remove you from their lives completely. End, stop. This is not something I want to do, but if you threaten the well-being of my children, their confidence or worth again, I will remove you from their lives completely. Without question, I’d take on a bear attacking them as well.
March 8, 2017
My letter to you, Reader, regarding what feels to me like the conclusion of the self-healing I’ve been doing during the past year, and the start of my new me going forward.
My dad passed away during the wee hours of the morning on February 10, 2017. We got the call around 2:30 am at our house. I was an expected call, he’d been declining quickly in the New Year, and I was impressed that he actually had a final birthday in January. When my husband woke me up, it was a toss-up for who had passed away first, my grandpa with advanced Alzheimer’s, or my dad with advanced cancer.
I had been expecting that the news would be difficult when it came, due to the rocky state of affairs leading up to his expiry. Overall, I held onto the generic belief that I would regret a few of the things that I’d said and done, but that the level of regret for saying something would still be smaller than the level of regret had I said nothing and continued to perpetuate the unhealthy relationship. I’d already accepted this outcome, and whatever fall-out came with it.
Funny how things turn out.
My husband took the call because he has a land-line phone in his bedroom, then he came over and woke me up to tell me. I called my mom back to see if there was anything she needed, but my brother was out there for a final visit and he was coming to the hospice to pick her up and take her home. She was just waiting. She asked me to call some family friends, and we hung up. Then I went back to sleep.
I’d booked that Friday off work earlier in the week because I was tired and there was a small break in the usually busy schedule. I was really looking forward to the long weekend even though there was an itch in my brain that I was going to need the days off. My oldest still had kindergarten, though, and my husband and I had agreed around Wednesday sometime that he would get her up for school as per normal, and if I was up then our youngest and I would come for the school drop-off as well. In that respect, the timing was pretty good for my dad to pass away that night. My husband and I quickly went back to sleep because the phone ringing and the quiet conversations didn’t wake up the kids, and our original plan still held.
I can’t dictate whether or not you believe in ghosts, spirits, angels, religious teachings, or any of the woo-woo trend that’s gotten popular the past years, but in my world ghosts are as real as any other energy, and many bits of the woo-woo trend align with my own personal views on life and the universe and all that. That said, around 3:30am that Friday morning, my dad’s ghost came through the house.
For many people, the final visit of a recently deceased person is a peaceful or terrifying event (dependant on personal views of these things). I hadn’t really expected anything because just before Christmas, my deceased great-grandmother came through the house on her way to wait for my dad. A quick visit, but she was a sweet lady when alive and has remained so since. It was a very touching and lovely moment having her tap in and help me with some unfamiliar baking that I was attempting. I’ve had other ghosts that ‘live’ with me, or that I’ve stayed in the house where they ‘live’ – yes, the kind of ghosts that move things and show up in reflections – and with the small exception have only had good experiences. However, because Great Granny was going to my dad, I didn’t expect to hear from him at all; I expected a phone call and a lingering feeling of small regret.
Instead, my husband gets woken up to the sound of a heavy shampoo bottle falling in his on-suite bathroom. Nothing had fallen. Then he got a blast of sullen anger (which my dad was very good at) and a general feeling of ‘ick’. At the same time, our carbon monoxide detector – which is right outside my bedroom door in the basement – started going off. It wouldn’t reset from its error message, and it wouldn’t stop. I buried it in a blanket pile, in the closet of a room the furthest from everyone’s bedrooms, and closed the room door. That’s when I got hit with the sullen anger and general ‘ick’.
Being somewhat empathic, and having my own experiences in dealing with de-bodied souls and energies, the ‘ick’ and anger quickly solidified into emotions. Chiefly: how dare we all roll over and go back to sleep?! Apparently, we should have been wailing. We should have woken up the kids. We should have called the family friends immediately and disrupted their sleep, despite them having work in the morning. We also should have been heart-broken.
That’s when it hit me. I wasn’t heart-broken. My emotional and mental state hadn’t altered between Thursday night when I went to bed and early Friday morning when we got the call. I’d already said my good-byes, I’d already mourned the good parts of the lost relationship, and my oldest still had school in the morning. And he was going to wake her up if he kept at it, coming into my house like this, and mess up her day, or give both girls nightmares… yeah, no. Those are my kids. Not gonna happen tonight.
His challenge: YOU SHOULD MISS ME! Backed by the emotion of family ties and required emotional responses that were due for being the recently departed patriarch.
My response: If you wanted all of that, you shouldn’t have been such a dick while you were still breathing. GET. OUT.
I’ve learned over the years how to evict things that are unwanted. It also really helps when you have extra souls in your house that are friendlies, which I currently do because of all the turmoil and upheaval. My aunt has a very haunted house, with an average of probably six extra souls around at any given time, and her uncle, who passed before I was born, has been keeping an eye on us. He’d been very close to her when she was young, and she’d been really worried about us, so he’d come our way. It’s been good, he’s found some things that have been lost for months, and has been a really loving feeling in the room when there are bad feels going on. Long story short, I threw out my dad, and then went back to bed with the knowledge that the focus of my worry – my girls – had their great-great uncle watching out for them.
The next morning, my husband got our oldest up and they went to school while our youngest and I got to sleep in a bit. The general ‘ick’ and sullen anger wasn’t out of the house, though.
Over the course of my life, my folks embedded a network of emotional drains and ties. A lot of visualization for this kind of thing, when dealing with emotional vampires, is likened to having a bunch of power cables attached to your body. Think like that movie ‘The Matrix’, where humans are batteries for machines, but for the sake of the visualization each cable goes back to a different person. Over the past year, I’ve discovered that my folks embedded their catches and triggers all over me, in different thoughts and memories, so that even when I thought I’d cut a cord, another would be in a different place, and I could never find the actual mainline.
So, tripping on all those loops and twists over the course of the weekend, I managed to rebolster the house protections and lock my dad out. The removal of the sullen angry improved the feel of the house 100%, but the lingering ‘ick’ was still there. So we cleansed the house – cleaning with intention – and got rid of the ‘ick’ out of the house completely.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the ‘ick’ out of me. Too many loops and twists.
When I went back to work on Monday, it was next to impossible to concentrate. This is pretty normal for me on a Monday, though, as the weekends let me be a mom and work on my writing and it’s getting harder every week to push all that awesome into the corner so the work part can come back out. What wasn’t normal was the idea to run a small moment of internal energy work and see if I could get that ‘job’ focus to snap back so I could do the stuff I needed to in order to earn my paycheck.
As soon as I closed my eyes, I could clearly ‘see’ all the loops and twists, the different cords and threads connecting me to all the people I care about. And one of them, near the surrounding shadow, was shriveling to ash. The same as the eagle attack, when I opened my eyes it all stopped. When I closed my eyes, I could watch it coming closer to me. It was the cord to my dad, dying because he had, and soul energy isn’t strong enough to keep a cord unless the living person it attaches to sustains it. I had stopped sustaining it.
I’d had a conversation with a friend a few weeks prior, she does reiki and I had asked for her help untangling all the cabling that was stopping me, and she’d said that a lot of people who deal with emotional vampires on a regular basis don’t know that knocking away the cords is only half of it. You have to fill the divot, or it’s just an open scar for the next attachment to have easy access. Per someone a lot smarter with energy than I am, love, acceptance, and positivity are the strongest shields to scab over the scar. And there’s this nifty benefit of having good people around me: I have a very cool network of energy that I can tap for positive work, and to share back to so that things stay positive.
As I watched that long awaited identification of the mainline become a wasted trail, I welcomed it, and opened up to that very cool energy network. I easily visualized that cord – wrapping around and choking my insides for so many years – turning to ash; all the loops and twists crisping and then sitting there. I breathed in all that good energy, and blew out all that ash. I could actually feel the particles shaking loose and hitting the back of my throat as they were expelled. When I breathed in again, I pulled only the good stuff and let it fill the spaces the disintegrated cord had left. Full love, full light.
So cool.
What feels like the final lesson that started from a lovely eagle clawing at my face seems like it now was realized, and the unhealthy ties severed. The twists and loops from my mom were snipped tidily, replacing the bad with good again, and I pushed them off of me. The permanent attachments were gone. I was able to identify the main line to my mom, and put a temporary connector on the end – one of those quick-connect lines for air systems, if you’ve worked in metal fabrication shops you’ll know what I mean. If not, then just know it’s a connection that a person can control, connecting and disconnecting quickly as required.
For what my mom is going through, that’s okay. Losing your soul mate, who was also your spouse of over forty years, is probably only second to losing your child. Even though I can’t be a full participant in the loss, I can still have compassion for it. There are boundaries, and they are maintained, and compassion can still get through. For the ‘me’ that I want to be, the compassion part is important. For the ‘me’ that I am, being able to control when the compassion is given, and to whom, is important. Both values are met right now. I’m actually, for really reals, okay. And it’s only the first year…
My letter to you, Reader, regarding what feels to me like the conclusion of the self-healing I’ve been doing during the past year, and the start of my new me going forward.
My dad passed away during the wee hours of the morning on February 10, 2017. We got the call around 2:30 am at our house. I was an expected call, he’d been declining quickly in the New Year, and I was impressed that he actually had a final birthday in January. When my husband woke me up, it was a toss-up for who had passed away first, my grandpa with advanced Alzheimer’s, or my dad with advanced cancer.
I had been expecting that the news would be difficult when it came, due to the rocky state of affairs leading up to his expiry. Overall, I held onto the generic belief that I would regret a few of the things that I’d said and done, but that the level of regret for saying something would still be smaller than the level of regret had I said nothing and continued to perpetuate the unhealthy relationship. I’d already accepted this outcome, and whatever fall-out came with it.
Funny how things turn out.
My husband took the call because he has a land-line phone in his bedroom, then he came over and woke me up to tell me. I called my mom back to see if there was anything she needed, but my brother was out there for a final visit and he was coming to the hospice to pick her up and take her home. She was just waiting. She asked me to call some family friends, and we hung up. Then I went back to sleep.
I’d booked that Friday off work earlier in the week because I was tired and there was a small break in the usually busy schedule. I was really looking forward to the long weekend even though there was an itch in my brain that I was going to need the days off. My oldest still had kindergarten, though, and my husband and I had agreed around Wednesday sometime that he would get her up for school as per normal, and if I was up then our youngest and I would come for the school drop-off as well. In that respect, the timing was pretty good for my dad to pass away that night. My husband and I quickly went back to sleep because the phone ringing and the quiet conversations didn’t wake up the kids, and our original plan still held.
I can’t dictate whether or not you believe in ghosts, spirits, angels, religious teachings, or any of the woo-woo trend that’s gotten popular the past years, but in my world ghosts are as real as any other energy, and many bits of the woo-woo trend align with my own personal views on life and the universe and all that. That said, around 3:30am that Friday morning, my dad’s ghost came through the house.
For many people, the final visit of a recently deceased person is a peaceful or terrifying event (dependant on personal views of these things). I hadn’t really expected anything because just before Christmas, my deceased great-grandmother came through the house on her way to wait for my dad. A quick visit, but she was a sweet lady when alive and has remained so since. It was a very touching and lovely moment having her tap in and help me with some unfamiliar baking that I was attempting. I’ve had other ghosts that ‘live’ with me, or that I’ve stayed in the house where they ‘live’ – yes, the kind of ghosts that move things and show up in reflections – and with the small exception have only had good experiences. However, because Great Granny was going to my dad, I didn’t expect to hear from him at all; I expected a phone call and a lingering feeling of small regret.
Instead, my husband gets woken up to the sound of a heavy shampoo bottle falling in his on-suite bathroom. Nothing had fallen. Then he got a blast of sullen anger (which my dad was very good at) and a general feeling of ‘ick’. At the same time, our carbon monoxide detector – which is right outside my bedroom door in the basement – started going off. It wouldn’t reset from its error message, and it wouldn’t stop. I buried it in a blanket pile, in the closet of a room the furthest from everyone’s bedrooms, and closed the room door. That’s when I got hit with the sullen anger and general ‘ick’.
Being somewhat empathic, and having my own experiences in dealing with de-bodied souls and energies, the ‘ick’ and anger quickly solidified into emotions. Chiefly: how dare we all roll over and go back to sleep?! Apparently, we should have been wailing. We should have woken up the kids. We should have called the family friends immediately and disrupted their sleep, despite them having work in the morning. We also should have been heart-broken.
That’s when it hit me. I wasn’t heart-broken. My emotional and mental state hadn’t altered between Thursday night when I went to bed and early Friday morning when we got the call. I’d already said my good-byes, I’d already mourned the good parts of the lost relationship, and my oldest still had school in the morning. And he was going to wake her up if he kept at it, coming into my house like this, and mess up her day, or give both girls nightmares… yeah, no. Those are my kids. Not gonna happen tonight.
His challenge: YOU SHOULD MISS ME! Backed by the emotion of family ties and required emotional responses that were due for being the recently departed patriarch.
My response: If you wanted all of that, you shouldn’t have been such a dick while you were still breathing. GET. OUT.
I’ve learned over the years how to evict things that are unwanted. It also really helps when you have extra souls in your house that are friendlies, which I currently do because of all the turmoil and upheaval. My aunt has a very haunted house, with an average of probably six extra souls around at any given time, and her uncle, who passed before I was born, has been keeping an eye on us. He’d been very close to her when she was young, and she’d been really worried about us, so he’d come our way. It’s been good, he’s found some things that have been lost for months, and has been a really loving feeling in the room when there are bad feels going on. Long story short, I threw out my dad, and then went back to bed with the knowledge that the focus of my worry – my girls – had their great-great uncle watching out for them.
The next morning, my husband got our oldest up and they went to school while our youngest and I got to sleep in a bit. The general ‘ick’ and sullen anger wasn’t out of the house, though.
Over the course of my life, my folks embedded a network of emotional drains and ties. A lot of visualization for this kind of thing, when dealing with emotional vampires, is likened to having a bunch of power cables attached to your body. Think like that movie ‘The Matrix’, where humans are batteries for machines, but for the sake of the visualization each cable goes back to a different person. Over the past year, I’ve discovered that my folks embedded their catches and triggers all over me, in different thoughts and memories, so that even when I thought I’d cut a cord, another would be in a different place, and I could never find the actual mainline.
So, tripping on all those loops and twists over the course of the weekend, I managed to rebolster the house protections and lock my dad out. The removal of the sullen angry improved the feel of the house 100%, but the lingering ‘ick’ was still there. So we cleansed the house – cleaning with intention – and got rid of the ‘ick’ out of the house completely.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the ‘ick’ out of me. Too many loops and twists.
When I went back to work on Monday, it was next to impossible to concentrate. This is pretty normal for me on a Monday, though, as the weekends let me be a mom and work on my writing and it’s getting harder every week to push all that awesome into the corner so the work part can come back out. What wasn’t normal was the idea to run a small moment of internal energy work and see if I could get that ‘job’ focus to snap back so I could do the stuff I needed to in order to earn my paycheck.
As soon as I closed my eyes, I could clearly ‘see’ all the loops and twists, the different cords and threads connecting me to all the people I care about. And one of them, near the surrounding shadow, was shriveling to ash. The same as the eagle attack, when I opened my eyes it all stopped. When I closed my eyes, I could watch it coming closer to me. It was the cord to my dad, dying because he had, and soul energy isn’t strong enough to keep a cord unless the living person it attaches to sustains it. I had stopped sustaining it.
I’d had a conversation with a friend a few weeks prior, she does reiki and I had asked for her help untangling all the cabling that was stopping me, and she’d said that a lot of people who deal with emotional vampires on a regular basis don’t know that knocking away the cords is only half of it. You have to fill the divot, or it’s just an open scar for the next attachment to have easy access. Per someone a lot smarter with energy than I am, love, acceptance, and positivity are the strongest shields to scab over the scar. And there’s this nifty benefit of having good people around me: I have a very cool network of energy that I can tap for positive work, and to share back to so that things stay positive.
As I watched that long awaited identification of the mainline become a wasted trail, I welcomed it, and opened up to that very cool energy network. I easily visualized that cord – wrapping around and choking my insides for so many years – turning to ash; all the loops and twists crisping and then sitting there. I breathed in all that good energy, and blew out all that ash. I could actually feel the particles shaking loose and hitting the back of my throat as they were expelled. When I breathed in again, I pulled only the good stuff and let it fill the spaces the disintegrated cord had left. Full love, full light.
So cool.
What feels like the final lesson that started from a lovely eagle clawing at my face seems like it now was realized, and the unhealthy ties severed. The twists and loops from my mom were snipped tidily, replacing the bad with good again, and I pushed them off of me. The permanent attachments were gone. I was able to identify the main line to my mom, and put a temporary connector on the end – one of those quick-connect lines for air systems, if you’ve worked in metal fabrication shops you’ll know what I mean. If not, then just know it’s a connection that a person can control, connecting and disconnecting quickly as required.
For what my mom is going through, that’s okay. Losing your soul mate, who was also your spouse of over forty years, is probably only second to losing your child. Even though I can’t be a full participant in the loss, I can still have compassion for it. There are boundaries, and they are maintained, and compassion can still get through. For the ‘me’ that I want to be, the compassion part is important. For the ‘me’ that I am, being able to control when the compassion is given, and to whom, is important. Both values are met right now. I’m actually, for really reals, okay. And it’s only the first year…
