Living As All of Me

[HannahOne]

SanMagic7, thank you for reading and commenting! I was quite interested in the idea of instinctual boundary. I have been pondering this idea. How I had to overrule this instinct in the past. How I might tune into it more, now. Thank you!

[HannahOne]

Whiskers.

How to feel along the edges. How to know the boundaries. Can I fit? Is there space for me? How to scan, read the room. What is coming near?

The light catches Frank's whiskers like a halo. He moves his muzzle and they quiver. They pick up the airstream, the bunching up of air molecules that indicates the leg of the chair, the vibration of the dog's feet on the wood floor on the other side of the house. He walks foot by foot to the edge of the couch, sticks his head under. His whiskers feel along the edges. Will his rotund hind end fit through? He backs up. Sits up, whiskers vibrating. No more dog footsteps. Just the breeze from the ceiling fan, the clump of air at the leg of the chair. And me, my breathing. He twitches his whiskers to double check. He lowers himself, loafs. All quiet now.

And my whiskers? I feel I've been given a whisker-ectomy. I can't always feel who is near, who is coming, the size of an opening in life and if I can or cannot fit through. Instinctual decisions don't come instinctually. Instead, I start thinking. Did she mean what she said? What did she mean? She didn't mean that. She said something opposite before. But what if she did mean it? How can I know? I'm overthinking it. No I'm not! She must have meant something else....And round and round and round...

Frank sits up, alarmed. TOO LOUD, he says. TOO MUCH THINKING.

Sorry Frank. I am cluttering the air with mental noise, raising the vibration too high.
Is there a wolf? he asks.
No.
Ok then, he says. Shh.

Right, got it. Sorry. Shhh, shhh. Back into the body, the warm velveteen sack of fur, meat, bone, nerve. Well, I'm not so velveteen. Back into my meat suit, bone, nerve... I loaf. Frank flings his back feet out behind him in superman pose. He's not going anywhere anytime soon.

[sanmagic7]

Instead, I start thinking. Did she mean what she said? What did she mean? She didn't mean that. She said something opposite before. But what if she did mean it? How can I know? I'm overthinking it. No I'm not!

Hannah1, this quote got to me.  i live in a part of the country where people are very 'nice', as in, they don't always tell the truth for fear of hurting someone's feelings.  not that they have to come out and say 'yuck, i hate that' or anything harsh - there are ways to say something just doesn't work for you, or it's not of your personal taste w/o being brutal or unkind - but too many people i know do actually lie or skirt the truth in a way to leave me confused, and, yes, i now have to question many things told me by these people.

example:  i asked my friend if she like quacamole, and she gave me an enthusiastic 'yes', so i made some the way i learned from living in mexico.  i gave her a container of it, the next time i talked to her i asked her if she liked it, she said 'it's all gone'.  then i said, ok, cool, i'll make more when i get avocados, and she hesitated before whatever it was she said.  so, the next time i saw her, i asked about the hesitation, the 'it's all gone' statement, and she told me neither she nor her hub liked it, and it was tossed (gone).  he happened to be there at the tie, i said 'i hear you didn't like the guacamole i made' and he froze, stock still, deer in the headlights, looked at his wife, and i said that she'd already told me neither of them had liked it. 

then came the time-aged strategy explanation - we didn't want to hurt your feelings.  i said, you know, i heard you liked it, and i was going to make more for you (to me guac is a treat!), but you would've let me go thru all that work just to throw it away?  i'd rather be hurt by the truth than by a lie, and just cuz you don't like something i've given you doesn't hurt my feelings.

what came from this is much more wariness around these people, all the questions you asked, cuz on more than one occasion there has been promises made and broken, say one thing one time, the opposite another time, expectations that weren't followed thru on, and i've decided i really can't trust them to be honest with me.  so, yes, all those questions you asked, i think they can be pertinent in such situations.  w/ such 'nice' people we can rarely be sure they'll follow thru on what they've said, or mean what they say in the first place.  it's too bad.  but, please, don't make yourself crazy over it.  too many people have been taught to lie to 'save face', or not hurt someone's feelings.  just tread carefully, i think, and understand what might be going on underneath what someone says.  i think that's one way we can protect ourselves. 

by the by, this friend has other very good qualities, which is why i'm not going to eliminate her from my life - at least not now - but i remain wary, and take what she says w/ a grain of salt till i see proof.  love and hugs
 

[HannahOne]

SanMagic7, isn't overthinking such a witch? I exhaust myself!

[HannahOne]

In ACT and DBT they talk about circles of suffering. How there's the original trauma and then how our responses can add to the suffering. This could become self-blame, but it can also become a way out. Depends on how you look at it.

I notice ways of being in myself that are adding to my suffering. I have the original trauma, resonating REALLY hard right now. Unfortunately. It's a bell that is easily rung and then I'm vibrating with it in my teeth for weeks and weeks. My jaw hurts, my bones hurt. I can't see straight.

So what do I do?

I isolate. I stay in bed and stare at the wall. I guess I'm spacing out. I think about what I need to do that day, and I activate some part of me to do the things. A bit robotically. Make the sandwiches, feed the beasts. And then back to bed. Once I'm in bed I think about what I'll have to do next and I shut down until that time. When the alarm goes off, I robotically get up and do the next set of things. The kids are very active right now, one in school and a part time job, one in school and several activities so they are like ships in the night, stopping home at 4 pm to get refueled (sandwiches!) and then off again, coming home before bed. I greet, hug, I can be a mom. But then back to bed and spacing out. I'm sundowning at 8-9pm, I get anxious, everything feels smaller and darker and I don't want any demands. Twelve hours of fitful sleep. I wake up with my eyelids glued shut. I know winter is making everyone stir crazy. I'm also doing suffering. I'm doing the thing I do to avoid the pain I carry. I'm creating more suffering, more problems, leaving problems unsolved. It's not great.

For a good period of months I was undoing it. I was doing clothes, going out, talking to people, taking more clients, making art. I was undoing all of that.

The last few weeks I am doing it more and more. I'm doing something I don't want. I can't seem to undo it. I don't have what I need to undo it right now and I don't know how to get it. In the past I feel I was much stronger in many ways. I had a lot of energy to go get the things I needed. To do, in the outer world. To go get what I needed, to seek and find, to plug into things and create energy, create a home, a community. I created many communities.

I don't know why but I turned 50 and I can't do it anymore. Some of it may be the pandemic, I know everyone is struggling right now to create community. I fear some of it is post-traumatic decline catching up to me. Even though I was in therapy for 30 years and worked so hard, I was always at the cutting edge of the latest trauma therapy and the therapist was always building the plane as we were flying it, going to get more training, let's try this, let's try this, and I tried it all. Some of it helped for sure. Some of it was retraumatizing. And also I'm just a little jaded now. I've jumped through all the hopes. Sure, let's play DBT. Let's play CBT. Let's play NARM. Wanna play EMDR? Sure I'll move my eyes/hold your tappers/go with it. Wanna play Gestalt? Sure I'll talk to a chair. I was game, I'd try anything.

Now? Eh. I mean sure. Let's play psychodynamic and talk about countertransference. Yawn. It's like someone else is "doing" therapy and I'm just watching going, "eh." I CBA.

for many people midlife includes a loss of faith. Check. I used to be very religious, I was raised in a crazy religious stew. I spent years straitening if out, got a degree in religion to fully grasp the field, tried this one, that one. Religion helped me survive, it gave me a sense of meaning and justice and a purpose, a sense of safety, a Sky Daddy to replace the earthly one. A community. It gave me so much.

Now? Eh. I'm ok without it now. But without faith in religion, and without faith in therapy, I'm not really sure what to have faith in. Who to have faith with. How to go forward just me, naked in the storm? No sky daddy, no earthly therapist mommy. No supervision. No vision. No community. No meaning, justice, purpose. No shelter in the storm.

[TheBigBlue]

I would love to have an answer, but I don't.

What you wrote - the robot mode, the spacing out, the sundowning, the loss of faith in all the frameworks that used to hold you - that doesn't sound like "doing suffering"; it sounds like surviving another wave with the tools that are left.

If you find an umbrella that actually works in this storm, please hand me one too. 👀🔍🌧☔

In the meantime, I'll sit here with you in it - just two soggy humans scanning the horizon and looking for it together. ☔💛

[sanmagic7]

well, that's 3 soggy humans, hannah1 (thanks for the visual, TBB).  i think we do the best we can at any given moment.  yeah, age does change some things - physically and emotionally.  physically, well, how do i count the ways?  emotionally - we've seen so much more now than 20 yrs. ago, we've experienced more, we've tried more, we've fallen more, we've gotten ourselves back up more - for better or worse, we're on the treadmill of life.

as i've heard many times here on the forum, this, too, shall pass.  as we go thru it, it often seems like it really won't, but i've discovered it always does.  just get thru it as best you can.  sending you a warm blanket filled with healing color to help absorb some of the worst of it.  the fact that you are still mothering, still being there for your kids says a lot.  don't ever count that out, ok?  it's huge.  and it's doing a lot.  love and hugs

[Chart]

The dark night of the soul is just that... the descriptive absence of any spark of luminosity doesn't come even close. Just before falling into the pit I called out how once I'd been blind...

[HannahOne]

Chart and TheBigBlue, thank you for commenting and being soggy with me   the BigBlue maybe you're right... the tools that are left. Sometimes run out of tools. SanMagic7, thank you for the virtual rainbow blanket you sent! Very warm and rainbow-y. You reminded me of something important.

I used to use a lot of imagery. I am going to return to that. I was very afraid of giving birth, and I am afraid of doctors. So I needed to use a midwife at home, and that meant no pain medication. And for various reasons birth was a little more risky for me. So I had to get the baby out smoothly so I could stay home and avoid going to the hospital. So I had to learn how to be unafraid and manage the pain. And self-hypnosis worked very well. I did hours a day of guided imagery on how to have a rainbow waterfall of main medication, how to have a pain dial, how to ride through pain. And I had no pain in either labor, both babies born healthy, both a natural high. The high of my life. I know imagery works for me. When the first baby came out I said, "That was easy, let's do it again!" LOL. And....we did.

I am going to work on that "internal dial" to manage the intensity of my experience Slashy and I were talking about. I'm going to reimagine the safe spaces I used to use. And the rainbow waterfall. And add this rainbow blanket from SanMagic7. And I used to have a black bear. A mama bear. I had a thermometer where I could turn pain up and down. Not dissociate, not turn off my senses entirely. Just turn pain up and down. I had one therapist who helped me create all kinds of internal resources during the infernal EMDR, which I do not recommend EMDR for us.... but the internal resources really helped. Since my external resources are a bit shaky right now, this will help. It's also much more productive to do imagery than to just space out, and it's only  a small step. It's one I can do.

Meanwhile I'm trying to make strides. Went to my kid's horse clinic today, they rode SO WELL. it was amazing to see every time they adjusted their body, the horse responded and went rounder. Every time they opened the hand, loosened their back, dropped their heel, the horse moved out bigger, dropped its head lower. In the same way if I make small adjustments, my horse, my soul, will drop its head and breathe and go. more forward, more round, more bend. I can keep making small adjustments. It's not a big dramatic move, most people wouldn't see the small shifts my kid was making. Small.

Came home from the horse clinic, small steps. Did not get into bed. Did some dishes, rotated laundry, picked up my room, repacked my hiking suitcase. 4 weeks to go. Resting now for 20 minutes, I'm going to stay up and moving today.

After talking with some friends I am considering more seriously what I wrote yesterday. Ok I don't believe in a sky daddy and I don't believe in therapy mommy. I'm fifty. Maybe I need to believe more in myself. Myself. Me. I know some of my experience is "outside the realm of normal", that's what "trauma" is defined as. And so I'm a little outside the realm of typical in some ways. Most people don't notice it. It's a small difference overall. And, I'm still good. I can do. I can be. I don't need to hand over so much authority to others. I can author my life and make it fit me. I'm scared, I'm scared of the responsibility, what if I run my life off into the ditch, what if I mess up. But that's dependency. I need to shoulder my own life.

I will have to be aware of falling into the trap of comparison. I will have to be leery of my inner critic who tears me down. I will have to notice when old tapes start playing. I will have to trust myself. If I once trusted a therapist, surely I can trust myself. If I once believed in God, surely I can believe in me.

And I can make small adjustments. I can feel. I feel my body, my horse, my soul, wants to move forward. Wants to breathe, drop its neck. It's not actually afraid... it got spooked but it's ready to move. If I can let go a little in my hands and find balance, if I can loosen my back and look up where I want to go, it will move. I don't need to be on a leash, I'm in a safe arena here, just my little house, little town, little life. Sunlight through the white curtains. Forward into the future. My resting time is over. Back in the saddle.

[HannahOne]

In midlife you start to see how your plans did or did not work out. My plan was to raise children. It's what I always wanted to do. In order to become someone who could raise children, I had to get out of my situation, I had to go to college, get a career, become independent. And I did. I didn't want to raise my kids trapped in poverty with an abusive man. It took me fourteen years from leaving home to get to safety, stability, some modicum of success. So I could become a mother.
 
I was aware I shouldn't build my life around my kids. I shouldn't try to live through them. That's what people say, "Don't build your life around other people." "You can't live through your kids." Sure.

But to my surprise, the kids lived through me. Maybe because I grew up with neglect, I didn't realize how much kids needed. How they needed me in order to live. How they needed to live through me. You couldn't leave them tied to a tree while you ran to the store. If you wanted to go anywhere, you had to bring the baby. Or find someone to watch it, and pay them...and who to trust? I trusted no one. The baby needed to be held, soothed, fed, changed, washed, and held some more. All day. And all night. They needed to look through my eyes, feel through my hands, think through my thoughts. They were so vulnerable, raw sponges, all wide eyes, taking everything in. They needed to interpret the world through me, through my vibes, my emotional body, my flesh. So I had to be chill, stable, happy. I had to generate happiness and peace in my rib cage for them to rest their heads on and sleep. I could not have my babies resting their heads on a racing heart, a stifled breath.

Once they were here, there wasn't so much room for me, for the All of Me. Not if I wanted to be what they needed. I had less bandwidth than the average bear to tolerate demands. So something had to go. I couldn't come home from work and veg anymore. I couldn't veg, ever. The kids, they needed me. Needed me to be fully present, all the time. Gradually over the course of eight years I kept cutting back work and cutting back work until I wasn't working at all.

My kids needed me, but I also needed them. I needed to be the one to raise them. I cried every day leaving them at daycare. The daycares never worked out. I tried a nanny. I cried. I wanted to be the nanny. I wanted it to be me. I got home from work and washed the baby's head, the other woman's smell on their skin a torment. My baby. My toddler. My preschooler. Another baby. And another. And so it went.

Now my kids are grown. No longer babies or toddlers. They still need me, and one's still in high school. But they're grown. They don't need me the same way. Not all the time. Not even much of the time. They are themselves, now. They feed and wash themselves. They feel through their own hands, think through their own minds, see through their own eyes. I have myself back.

And how did my plan work out? For them, fabulously well. They are so sane. So well. They have their own therapist. They can set boundaries like nobody's business. They know what's their business and what's someone else's. They know what feelings are, and whose feelings are whose. They know how to manage stress, how to negotiate and compromise, how to grieve, how to celebrate. They don't wonder who they are. They know.

They know what it feels like to be safe, to take life for granted, to assume all will be well, to go to sleep on time and stay asleep till morning, to wake up into another day just like the one before, good. They dance ballet, hip hop, jazz, they play string instruments, they ride horses, they play sports, they get good grades, they have friends and lose friends and find new friends, they go to parties in sparkly dresses and put their hair up in a bun with only one hairpin, they back the car out of the garage and text me, "Leaving now." And when they arrive, "Arrived." They don't even think about it. They just...live their lives.

Through raising them I learned how to live. Every day I had to teach myself a new trick. How to love the child I have today. How to negotiate, compromise, handle stress, how to grieve and how to celebrate. I can't figure out the bun with one hairpin, but I learned how to hold on and how to let go, and when to do which. How to leave, how to arrive. I learned what love is. And came to understand the kind of love I had as a child, what kind of love that was. Not the right kind.

And here I am. And now what? The midlife question. I didn't build my life around my children, but they built their lives around me, and that narrowed my world. I didn't live through my children, but they lived through me, and I had to change my life  and myself to become what they needed me to be.

Creating these beings, living with them, giving them what I did not have---not just the horseback riding lessons and the string instrument but the security, the room to grow, and letting them be what I could not be, free... it changed me. It's what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to know what it was like. And while I couldn't live through them, I got to learn through them. The learn from my side of the relationship what it's like to be a good enough mother. I needed to see that.

How hard is it? It's hard. You don't get much sleep for years on end. You make a thousand meals a year, for twenty years. You fold a lot of onesies, t shirts, tank tops, jeans. You lose a lot of socks. You relearn algebra, biology, chemistry and physics and buy a lot of mechanical pencils in lime green. You soothe a lot of sadness, bury a lot of fish and hamsters, digging the frozen ground, helping them say goodbye, and you try not to call their bullies names, although you clench your fists. You clench your fists at night, wipe your own tears, am I doing it right, did I do good, do they have what they need, am I enough? And you know you're not. You learn to live with that.

And, somehow it's enough. Somehow it's really not that hard. It's challenging, and costly. It's also so easy. God it was so easy, to let your body melt around another little body. To stay awake next to a milky-breathed baby, to make sure they're breathing. I'll stay awake forever for that. To pat the back, to gaze into the wide eyes, pupils dilated with milky black and white dreams. To make the oatmeal. To bake the bread. To braid the freshly washed hair. Change the sheets. Hold the little hand like a little buttered roll sticking out of the blankets and say, "All is well. All is well," until they fall back asleep. How easily they believed me.

It was easy, so easy to love them. Easy not to hurt them. Easy to help them find their way. Easy to watch them grow. Easy to build the crib, the bunkbed, the study desk, the bulletin board on which they hang photos of their lovely, lovely life, and drawings of their grown-up technicolor dreams.

What's ahead feels not so easy. The goodbyes that are happening and that will come, I can do that. Off to college, off to work, off to the boyfriend's for the weekend. That's good. What's difficult is that my plan worked, and it didn't. While I got to do what I wanted to do in my life, I'm left still with what I didn't get. What I can never get. I'm confronted with the reality that having mothered for twenty years does not mother me. All the doing I did does not undo what was done to me, does not do what was left undone. For me.
 
I knew that, going in. You can't live through your kids. I guess it hits different now. Grief again. Smaller, lighter. Happier grief, really. Because I did it. I created these children and I raised them and I did not abuse them and their lives are good. They are so solid, so secure, so strong, so free. They have their struggles. But they are not traumatized.

I'm still traumatized. I'm healed and still healing. I'm strong and getting stronger. I'm happy and can get happier. When I feel at a loss lately I have to remember that I have what I need. I have the intense focus, the power, the creativity, to make a life worth living. I just need to turn all of that full force on myself again. And I have the knowing of how easy it can be, to follow my instincts, to be part of something bigger than me, to allow something more than All of Me to arrive.

It feels harder to change at my age, but I also have wisdom, strength, security I didn't have twenty years ago when I last really considered myself. When I rode the train to take belly dance class with strippers in Manhattan, to get over my frozen shame. When I rode a plane to Europe and sat in cathedrals, to get over my rage. When I drove to California to see the whales, to find a father figure in the sea. Who taught reading in the projects, who rehabbed animals, who walked next to the horse that killed a man? Who was that girl who did these wild and delicious things, who made of her life some kind of art, some kind of interactive installation, a modern mashup, of whales and cathedrals and jingling coin belts?

The kids still need me. I can't jet off to Paris yet. But I can start to imagine, feel differently, explore. If I get five more years, ten more years, twenty more years. What shape would I want to make that life? What outside of myself might I give to? What last few marks might I make? What would be organic? What would be real? What would be All of Me? These are not the questions of a traumatized person living in survival mode. These are the questions only available to those who are safe, who have some resources, who have some peace and sanity. And that's me, too.

I didn't achieve all my dreams. But I see how hard I tried. How bravely I fought. How seriously I worked to heal. And I'm grateful to me. All the me's. All of me. The little me who knew what was happening was wrong, and held onto that fire. The me who made a plan and got out. The me who stuck with the plan. The me who got help and help and help and help again, even when the help hurt. The me who worked to pay those bills. Those were big, big bills. The me who built the marriage, even though it faltered, even though now we look at each other and don't know who we are. Or what we want. Still, we stayed, and that was good. The me who birthed the kids under an imaginary rainbow waterfall that washed away the pain and left only the joy of how easy it is to open, to surrender, to create something totally new where before there was nothing. A whole new person. Hello, person.

The me who raised these persons, the slow struggle to learn each new person who comes into the world preset with preferences, personality, specific needs. No two are the same. One likes it hot, one likes it cold, one needs to be jiggled, one must never be jiggled, one needs to hear a song and one needs deepest silence. How I bent myself to be what each needed, round the clock, 24-7 for years on end. How that changed me, took me out of myself, released me into vulnerability, able to tolerate "my heart walking around outside my body," as someone once described it. The raw fear as they enter the school building, the brave smile and wave.

And the me now. Coming out of the pandemic losses. So many losses. So many dead friends. Three, for me. Dead family, two. Dead marriage, DOA. Dead bank account. Dead career.

But I'm alive. We made it. It's spring. What may come back from the dead is not yet known. And now what? Who am I, now? Will I do jazz, or tap? Do I like it hot or cold? Do I need to be jiggled, or must you never jiggle me? Song, or silence? So many losses. Nearly dead, sometimes. But alive, still.  Off I go, into the future. All is well. The brave smile. The wave.