That is a colorful little card that sits on my desk as a reminder. I am, grateful for ALL life experiences, as I am a lifelong learner and I am learning so much about life, about myself, how I respond, how I want to react. How to make myself a little better today than I was yesterday, more emotionally stable, having more compassion and empathy for myself and others. Remembering all I forgot when I incarnated in this life, little bit by little bit. Coming back into the place of unconditional love.
The innocence of children is actually the wisdom of children. Then life and experiences change and mold us. Many of us go through life trying to heal from the trauma of our childhood. Up until around the age of twenty I wondered why I had been born to the parents I had. I felt like they didn’t want me. Why oh why did they have children if they couldn’t take care of them?
The biological father wanted nothing to do with me, ever, all the way to his dying day when he tried to make sure I didn’t get a penny of his life’s work. It took me a few years after his death to realize it wasn’t about me, it was about his relationship with my mother and the lessons and dance they had together. My intuition tells me she really got to him, shamed him, something to make him hate her to his death. What a sad way to live. I still have inner work I need to do on my own emotions of that rejection that I grew up with. I felt it was a contributing factor in my “looking for love in all the wrong places.”
My mother, ah, I say that with different feelings than I did through most of my life. I know that Mom did the best she could. I walked her home a dozen years ago and as she was laying in her death bed, she apologized for not being a good mother. My only response was that she did the best she could. None of us kids were in jail or are junkies. I didn’t tell her that I have struggled with her imagined rejection of me. She dropped me off with Grandma every time she couldn’t handle me, take care of me, whatever it was. I spent at least half my childhood, if not more, with Grandma or aunts and uncles.
Today I am grateful that I had family to catch me when my parents could not do what my little child thought they “should” do. I thought a parent’s job was to love and protect their little ones. Isn’t that what we always see in the movies? It didn’t feel like it to me as a child but as I look back as an adult, I see that they did the best they could. We cannot give what we do not have within. I think my mother came closer to understanding unconditional love than my biological father but I am also recognizing it is not my place to judge. It IS my place to heal myself and in doing so, I heal generations of pain, loss and sadness.
Unconditional self love, that is what we are here to learn. For me to be able to do that, has taken to acknowledge all the parts and pieces, shadows, hurts, shames, blames. Taking responsibility changed the perspective in a big way. That in itself was/is a huge process. It doesn’t seem to have to do with anything more than learning unconditional self love. We all make our own choices on how complicated we make that. I’ve done a doozy of a job and now am working on untangling and freeing from the net of unconsciousness, the things that have been blocking my path to understanding unconditional self love. I am grateful for all life experiences, the teachers and the lessons, in this school called life. In gratitude,
Letting in the Light,
With Love