Mothering the self and others through suicidal ideation

I recently lost a family member to suicide. It’s not my story to tell, but what that action did – as suicide does – was cause the ripples of pain to go through the family, friends and community members of the person who died. Subsequently, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have lost their lives to suicide. I’ve been pondering what to do with all this loss and considering my own suicidal ideation over the course of my life. I’m contemplating what little contribution I can make to the conversation. Is there anything I’ve learned or seen that can help?

I first had suicidal ideation in 1980. I was 12 years old. My mother and I had recently moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I was in 7^th grade, in a Lutheran K-8^th grade parochial school. It was the last year I lived with my mother, and at that time I hit the lowest point in my life to date. My mother had been prostituting for a long time to support us, though I’d only known about it for two years. The day had come that school year where she told me to go out, get food and money, and she said she didn’t care how I did it. I did not consciously think she was sending me out to prostitute, though a fleeting thought crossed my mind to “go to the bars.” After all, that’s what she did. But it wasn’t something I could really grok, so I went to the homes of our neighbors, instead, asking for food, for money. When the first family whose door I knocked on looking for help closed the door in my face and left me on the sidewalk, I stood and howled into the night. My heart felt like it would break. I felt physical pain in my guts and in my whole body, really. I felt a pain of abandonment and betrayal that sliced right through me. I tried to go home after that incident, but my mom turned up the radio and said she would not turn it down and let me go to sleep until I brought home what she’d asked for. So I headed back into the night until a kind family gave me $2.00 and a bag of groceries from their own kitchen.

The next day, I went to school. The kids there seemed to hate me. I was the new kid, and probably more than a little strange to them. I’d lived in Detroit, then Virginia, before Sheboygan, and the kids made fun of my accent, my clothes, my mother. I was awkward and homely, and I didn’t much like them either. I was often hungry, having not eaten at home before school (and sometimes after), so the highlight of my day was school lunch. Otherwise, school just brought more pain. I fantasized about telling them what I faced at home, hoping they would have some sympathy and lay off. I never told them, and they didn’t let up until the school year ended.

That school year, I walked outside a lot, and the two places I seriously considered suicide were the bridges over the Sheboygan River on Pennsylvania Avenue and at 14^th and Indiana Ave. I would walk over and think, “I could jump.” I imagined drowning. My pain was profound and constant, and I could not imagine relief ever coming naturally. My mother could not help me. My teachers didn’t stop the bullying and abuse at school. It seemed I was as alone as I could possibly be. Eventually, I went into foster care, and my immediate pain was over. I learned to pretend my past never happened, and that worked for a while.

The next time I felt suicidal was in college, both my senior year and the year after graduation. I’d started therapy in college, and I’d opened the box of traumatic memories for the first time since they’d happened, including but not limited to my memories of being 12. I felt all the pain as if it were fresh, and I had no idea how to heal it. I couldn’t seem to make it go away, and stuffing it down and ignoring it had only led me to an eating disorder that increased my emotional ups and downs, my lack of mental clarity.

I’ve been thinking about the long road from those states of mind to where I am now, and pondering those who have died so recently, those who are hanging on.

One reflection I have is that it took so many years of people loving me for me to finally learn how to accept what I was getting as “enough.” I felt like an emotional black hole. People cared about me, but as soon as I left their presence, that gut-wrenching sense of abandonment returned. The image I had was that of having smooth walls inside myself, and I had no “pegs” to hang the gifts that others gave me. They just poured in and fell right through me. And finally, I got to a place where I somehow learned to create a peg that love could hang on. It was so many lessons that got me there that I hesitate to try to simplify it. I don’t think there’s a simple answer. I think about those who’ve died, and how loved they were. They were loved more than they knew, truly. They just couldn’t feel it in that dark place.

And with age, sometimes, comes the perspective of knowing that states pass. (Though Kate and Anthony belie that statement.) One friend told me her therapist said passing through a state is just that: pick the state you like the least, (I hate to name one here, but use your imagination) and say, “I’m passing through _____. I’m just passing through the state. I will get through to the other side eventually.” That helps me now. When I was suicidally depressed and in pain, I had no sense that the “state” I was in would ever change

But there’s so much more. There was 12-step recovery for the eating disorder, and so that particular component to my mental health picture improved. I stopped binging and purging. I went through an outpatient program that required I make three phone calls a day for my recovery, everyday. That habit is something I still use often. When I’m really struggling, I reach out. I connect with others. I don’t suffer in silence or suffer alone anymore.

One of my martial arts instructors told me to “sit down and watch my thoughts,” and out of that meagre instruction, I developed a taste for what meditation could do. I use meditation a lot now and metta (lovingkindness) practices. Meditation has taught me not only to observe my thoughts and feelings without judgment, but it has also taught me to practice kindness in my observations. I had internalized such deep self-contempt that even my very natural human experience in the face of deep suffering seemed to be a failing. Over years of practice, I’ve learned to sit with my internal experiences with compassion. That compassion is something I learned from so many friends who loved me, who loved each other and their children in my presence. I watched, and I learned. And I eventually could imagine looking at myself with that same kindness.

Metta, or lovingkindness, practice has also helped me to develop a sense of being on my own side. In metta, one repeats words of friendly intention toward self and others. For one’s self, one might say,

May I be safe.
May I be healthy.
May I be happy.
May I be at ease.

The words aren’t magic, but when one of my meditation teachers suggested I do this practice for 30 minutes/day for a week, I found myself feeling resistance, and I got really curious about that. What part of me is resistant to my own wellbeing, I wondered? I unearthed the ancient-feeling pact of partnering with my mother, with her hatred toward me. Through metta, I learned to welcome myself to my own life,. When I suffer now, I am no longer separated from myself. I am entirely on my own side, caring for my own experience, whatever it might be. I now practice metta toward myself before I practice for anyone else. I feel I owe myself a living amends, and that is one way I do it.

And yet, in writing this, I’m aware that there was more, so much more. Therapy. Yoga. Martial arts. Authentic Movement. Mentors. Friends. Art. Music. Religion, faith. One overnight stay in a psych ward. Three years of antidepressants after hospitalization. So much hard work, and lots and lots of failure.

I don’t have any illusions that I am invulnerable now, nor that someone grasping at these tools will always find reprieve. When I went through cancer three years ago, I contemplated suicide as a distant possibility, though I never got close to taking action. So all of this work is not a guarantee. It’s a regimen that alleviates my depression, most of the time. And yet a blow from life can send the whole chemical balance into disequilibrium. I remember that I’m in a state that will pass; I move my body and breath in ways that return me to feelings of wellbeing. I remember to practice metta and that reminds me that I don’t want to be the object of aggression when I just want the pain to stop.

And that’s it, really. Suicide is the alluring answer to unbearable pain, a lack of perspective that it could ever change or could ever change enough. And so many who commit suicide cannot, for whatever reasons, feel the connection with others that is meaningful enough for them to hang on.

Part of the reason I write this is that it has been a complex path, with so many factors that helped me, so many people who loved me (and many who loved me through their frustration with me). And my path was uniquely mine. Kate and Anthony had their own. Robin Williams had his own. My family member, his own.

For those of us who live, don’t give up. Keep loving. And keep looking for the ways in which we can more effectively work as a society to cultivate connection, to cultivate places where dealing with our deepest pain is not met with pat answers or judgment. We need universal healthcare, with full psychological resources. We need to address trauma, both that which is individual and that which is cultural, from injustice and poverty. We need to learn to heal, ourselves and one another. We need shamans and magic and science and art. We need to bring all our resources to bear for suicidal teens, adults, famous people, rich people, poor people, bullied people, for men, for women, for our military, for addicted, for gay, lesbian, trans, for successful and for not successful. For all our suffering, we need to do our own work and our cultural work to heal.

May all being be safe.
May all beings be healthy.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be at ease.

Namaste.

Skillful Filters: noticing – and choosing – the filters with which we view others

I have a recurring dream. I’m back at the job I had in my mid-20s. Things did not go well at that job. I tried to understand, tried to adjust my work to please my employers. I was actually quite enthusiastic about the work and saw it as a career move. I wanted to make it work, and when things started to go poorly, I initiated conversations, asked questions, tried to understand why they weren’t happy with me. Toward the end, when it seemed that nothing I could do was working, I interviewed at another job. The very day I finally had an offer in hand, my employer asked me if I was looking for other jobs. I answered honestly. He asked for my resignation. During that process, where I hand wrote a letter in front of him, he took the opportunity to say to me that Mary (a co-worker from my previous job) had told him what I did before I left there. When I looked shocked, he nodded his head and said, “That’s right. I know.”

The only problem was, I hadn’t done anything wrong that I was aware of, and I had no idea what Mary had told them. The look of shock on my face wasn’t one of surprise that he had discovered my secret; it was that he apparently thought I’d done something sinister at my previous job. In that moment of revelation, I was just beginning to register the ramifications of what he was saying. I was just beginning to understand that the reason that job had gone so horribly wrong was that no matter what I did or said, my employer was seeing me through a filter that had nothing to do with me. And there was nothing I could do about it. I was well on my way home before it occurred to me to ask what Mary had told him. I’d been too shocked at that moment, too pumped up on adrenaline with the anxiety of the situation to think clearly. I have always wondered what happened, wondered what Mary said, wished I could say, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Sometimes I dream I have found my former employer, and I have a chance to set the record straight. I awaken from these dreams with a sense of dread and lack of control. I had another such dream last night.

It has been almost 25 years since I left that job, and it was today I found release from the weight of that event.

These days, I’m sitting in meditation a lot. So I took that dream to the cushion with me. With my awareness anchored in the breath and my body, I allowed this scenario to unfold in my mind and my emotions, watching as it did so. I felt the deep sense of injustice of the situation. I perceived that my employers saw me through a filter I knew nothing about and had no control over, and nothing I did could win them over. Every action I took, every word I said, they interpreted through that filter, and I allowed myself in meditation to feel the full impact of that. I wept.

After several minutes, calm returned, and then as if in a mirror, I saw myself with my own filters firmly in place. I saw a recurring cynicism – a cynicism I can be quite attached to, even proud of. I can rock a room with laughter by being cynical. But I can also become mired down in my distrust of other people’s motives and intentions, a deep sadness that I can’t quite sink into full acceptance of the love and kindness that others bring to the table.

I felt my way back to childhood: I’d had no filters toward my caregivers whatsoever, and what I suffered in childhood cut straight to my heart. I’d assumed the best of mother and family, and as I’d been left unprotected, I assumed I deserved their abuses. By my teens, I’d finally found my armor. It seemed in retrospect that cynicism was actually protection, was actually wisdom, rather than an unnecessarily hard shell around me. My cynicism had come with an element of sadness that there was no one I could trust, not even myself. Over the years, my cynicism has become more refined, often repressed. But it is still there.

Deep distrust was a filter that prevented anyone or any group from succeeding in my life. By assuming ill intent or, at best, ignorance,  I could find evidence for it everywhere, and it could deflate the best of intentions in anyone. Even my own dear husband, a few years into our marriage, once asked me, “Couldn’t you give me the benefit of the doubt?”

I suddenly saw, as if in a funhouse mirror, that the gifts of my experience at that job so many years ago were ones I had not yet received: the gift of seeing how my own filters had prevented others from succeeding in giving to me as they’d wanted to do. It was the gift of seeing that I had choices about the filters with which I saw those I loved, those I worked with, those who employed me, those I went to church with. It was the gift of cynicism for my assumptions that fueled the filters themselves. It was the gift of empathy for those who suffer deeply when others filter them for the color of their skin, their religion, their gender. It was the gift of recognizing that filters are profoundly powerful. And it was the gift of having a little compassion for a man who was doing the best he could, at that time, with the information and skills he had. He was being human, too.

In meditation, I’m practicing compassion and generosity as filters with which I view myself and others. Every time I sink into a morass of shame or guilt, I expand the compassion with which I view myself to be just a little bigger than my faults. I’m also beginning to see that there are people who walk around with filters of kindness and generosity as the default, and those filters wield a powerful effect on those around them.

Having a filter of compassion doesn’t mean I never say “no” and or that I don’t create wise boundaries. I simply no longer need to do that out of a sense of fear or revulsion; I can do it with care and respect for both the other person and myself. I can also take time, when appropriate, to ask questions to really understand the person in front of me, rather than letting my habitual filters eliminate them from consideration prematurely.

After a wave of grief, I directed  deep compassion toward myself and toward the very understandable and human tendency to have filters like these. And I was filled with a deep sense of gratitude for my previous employer and his mistake. If it weren’t for his misunderstanding of me and the pain of that experience, I don’t know if I would have realized the pain I, too, cause others. I don’t know if I would truly understand the power of the filters with which I view others and how I can assist them in blooming – or wilting – in my presence.

Despite my best efforts before today, I have never felt anything other than sadness and resignation about that job. Today, I feel genuine gratitude. And I see before me another set of filters with which I can view my life and those around me. I’m excited to practice mindfulness through compassion and generosity toward others as part of this unfolding practice. I have the choice available to be skillful in my use of filters, or I can be unskillful and unconscious. I’m grateful to be restored to a sense of choice today.

Namaste.

The Wisdom of the Mother

I am a woman. I am a mother. I am a cancer survivor. I have been a body worker, a meditator, a yogini. I have participated in Gender Reconciliation work, M. Scott Peck’s Community Building work. I have walked a path of inner healing and physical healing, and I have shared that path with others in my work. I have a particular perspective on current political events and broader world events.

I am very aware that our culture not only undervalues women; it doesn’t actually perceive the Divine Feminine in men, women, children, or the Planet. The Feminine is quite literally invisible. Machismo, brute force, power over, individualism are a comic book version of Masculinity, and they are exalted and revered, separated in some sort of sick, psychic surgery from any balancing power. The Mother, whether she washes dishes, soothes a sick child, or resides beneath our feet as the Planet who feeds and holds us, is invisible. We step on her without awareness for her consciousness. We don’t say thank you. Her work is not valued. God help us if we have emotions or intuition! Because no outside authority stamps them as “Truth,” they are fluff; they are a mere distraction from productivity and consuming. Story is seen as child’s play, rather than as our creative force expressed in the world. Our art is entertainment, rather than the means by which we digest life and use its nutrients to heal and grow. The power of attention and deep listening is something we feel but have so few words to express. The ability to hold experience – our own or someone else’s – takes our breath away when we experience it, yet it is so hard to find language to describe.

I come from a patriarchal, Christian religious background. It never occurred to me when I was in it to question where the Mother was. It was a given that God was our Father, but the marked absence of the Mother was never spoken, seen, acknowledged. It strikes me as the height of hubris to assume God would declare himself Father without a Mother. I don’t think it was God. I think it was men who didn’t value the Mother who decided anything that smacked of feminine religious experience would be demonized. Divination? Satan. Intuition? Witchcraft. Emotion? Sin. (I am not saying that these things are the realm of women only; I am saying that if it was considered to be “of women” by those in power, it was historically branded as evil by those who could not control it.)

And now we face a United States in which our religiosity has led to Donald Trump. He is the expression of evangelical Christianity and its immoral angling for power at the expense of integrity and the common sense of the body. When we are aware of and in connection with our bodies, we don’t pollute our water and our air. We don’t poison our soil. Or, as my own mother would have said, “You don’t shit where you eat.”

But we seem to have a deeply held belief that drives our actions that says we can take without giving; we can have power over without responsibility for care.

Breast cancer was a deeply physical and spiritual disease process for me. My breasts being cut off felt like both a physical violence and a metaphor. The bar is closed, folks. Back off from the nurturing of others at your own expense, mother. You need to protect your own resources, or you will die. You will have nothing left to give, my cancer experience seemed to say.

I dove down deep, went inward. I found there the wounds of my earliest childhood, wounds passed down from an equally wounded mother. She could not validate my feelings, my experience, my existence, and so I walked through much of my life with a gaping hole where the validation of my being ought to have been. After cancer, I dove down into that wound, feeling instinctively that healing that energetic part was essential to my greater healing.*

Then Donald Trump became the president elect. As I write this, he will be inaugurated tomorrow. Every intuitive cell in my body says he is dangerous to our survival, not only the United States but also the whole interconnected world in which we live. He’s the proverbial drunk, molesting uncle you shouldn’t leave alone with your children, and his own words indict him as such. But his over-masculinized form of power and control – so valued by a vocal minority – have positioned him to rule.

I dive down deep into my own healing again. I am learning as I get older that all my grief and fear is something I need to own and love. But I cannot stop there, not if I take seriously my responsibility as a mother who simultaneously protects The Mother and depends upon Her. I must protect the sanctity of my inner wellbeing.

Light bearers right now are something like a single parent. The father figures at the helm have power, but they take no responsibility, and they aren’t living in the trenches. We need to dig deeply into our known experience; heal our wounds; love life; and love powerfully, love deeply, love wisely. We must say no to the violence, even the violence we perpetuate against ourselves. Maybe especially the violence we perpetuate against ourselves. We need to dig deep and find words to bring our divinity to awareness and to own its power, the legitimate power of fierce, gritty love; the transformative power of quiet presence; the healing power of embodiment. Let us all find within us the Good Mother, and in so doing protect The Great Mother.

*A great body of research and literature exists on the role of early life trauma and its impact on life expectancy and disease processes. Two great books on the topic include Gabor Maté’s When the Body Says No and Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. This is not to blame anyone for their individual diseases, but rather to show that generational trauma impacts generational health. Personally, I empower myself to know that I am not helpless in the face of those traumas; I release blame, as it does not help me to love whatever lifespan I am given on this earth.

Birth of a book

This week, I self-published The Wilderness of Motherhood: A memoir of hope and healing. It’s available for sale on Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle versions.

I started the book the day after Isaac was born, recording his birth while it was still fresh in my mind.

Five weeks later, my mother died, and I wrote about that strange, healing, difficult time with my mother.

A series of essays began in those early days that eventually became this book.

That was almost eight and a half years ago. I wondered many times if I were a neglectful mother of this book. I knew a book was possible, but I was also a single parent, working. I got married when Isaac was four, and we moved into a house and newly married life, and I changed jobs and careers. The book needed editing; it needed cover art; it needed technical details managed, such as the lay-out, marketing plan and self-publishing channel to use. It needed a lot that I wasn’t sure how to make happen, and it took these eight years to complete.

Fortunately or unfortunately, labor of a real baby is over relatively quickly. We have little control over how labor progresses, and then we have a baby (whether we feel ready or not!).

This Book Baby relied on the force of my will, the assistance and availability of friends, my ability or inability to give it attention, and a mysterious gestation time to mature.

It’s here now. I think I’m ready, and I hope you’ll join with me in celebrating its arrival. I have to say, at this point, it’s sleeping through the night, requires a manageable amount of tending, and has met with a kind and generous welcome from friends and family.

Connecting with Isaac through Maya Angelou

I’ve been reading Maya Angelou’s autobiographies. I’m sorry to admit I didn’t pick them up until she’d died.

This morning over breakfast, Isaac and I had a rare opportunity to talk alone. John is traveling for work, and Isaac’s camp doesn’t start until 8:45, so we had some unexpected and welcomed leisure to chat.

I told him I’d been reading the stories of a woman who had a son when she was only 16 years old. Back then, women didn’t have as many options: she had to put him in 24-hour/day care and see him only one day a week for much of his young life. Then, when he was about Isaac’s age, he stayed with his grandmother while Maya traveled as a dancer and singer with the European tour of Porgy and Bess, a welcomed career gem that gave her the chance to find her profession and the ability to support her child. She was gone for several months, and they both missed each other terribly. She came home early because her son was not doing well, and her family could no longer care for him. When they reunited, he clung to her and was afraid she would leave him again.

Isaac asked if I would ever go away like that. I told him I would not.

I told him that when I was pregnant with him, I worked very hard to get work that I could do when he slept and, later, use only minimal childcare. I didn’t want to spend 10 hours/day between travel to-and-from work, plus work itself. I wanted to be with him. I was older when I had him, and I had some options open to me that Maya did not.

He closed his eyes. Tears welled up under his eyelashes, puddles that sat there as he spoke.

“I don’t like going to school. I miss being with you,” he said, eyes still closed.

I asked him if he wanted a hug. He nodded, tears miraculously staying put under his inward gaze.

I knelt beside him and held him.

I told him I felt the same way when I was his age. I actually stayed home from school to be with my mom, but I got in trouble. The truant officer came to our house. I told him that parents who don’t send their children to school can be arrested and go to jail. Then we really wouldn’t see each other. We both laughed. We shared a lingering hug before moving on with the day.

We drove to Junior Water Sports Camp, a five-minute ride down the road. He asked me if four-dimensional bubbles were actually black holes. I didn’t know. He thought that was a good question for his Aunt Catherine, who has a PhD and studied black holes.

When I dropped him off, he ran off with hardly a backward glance. We were both sated from our time of connecting over Maya Angelou.

Art and vulnerability in wilderness places

On Mother’s Day eve, I read from my book to a warm, friendly group of both friends and strangers who had come to reflect on motherhood, whether as mothers themselves; as children of mothers; as those who wish to be mothers; as co-parents. Some had warm, happy memories of motherhood, and others had more conflicted and challenging memories and feelings.

I read from Isaac’s birth story, the story of our bonding immediately after and the profound shift that happened in my universe from that event, and from the story of my mother’s death, five weeks after Isaac’s birth. It was intense stuff, and I was deeply touched that, as one person told me, “you could have heard a pin drop” as I read. I was moved by re-entering those stories, and my audience touched their own deep experiences in those moments.

So it was a surprise to me that the shaking and trembling I felt as I started to read did not dissipate. Rather, it got quite pronounced. First, I searched futilely for a middle rung on the chair for my feet; then I used one hand to steady the other; when that didn’t work, I rested my hands and the folio containing the reading on my shaking knees. Nothing really worked.

Why didn’t I write a book on something just a little less vulnerable, I had to ask myself. Something lighter (I really enjoy comedy and could use a laugh or two)? Something that wouldn’t make me sweat, shake and choke back tears at the most evocative moments?

People told me that they went to their own deeply personal and deep places during that reading. 

“I’d forgotten what childbirth was like; I remembered my own birth experience – I was there again – as I heard you read,” one woman shared.

“I was with my mom when she died, and I relived that moment tonight,” one of the men shared.

Not everyone wants to go to intense and deep places in their memories. For our time of creating together in painting and drawing and collage, however, those deep places fed the art that each of us wanted to create. We could explore the joys of mothering or being mothered; we could also explore the shadows and the ambiguities. Greeting cards don’t often give us such nuanced ways to express those profound and human feelings.

That vulnerability that I clearly felt – and shared transparently with others – gave them permission to do the same in their art. And they took that permission and ran with it. What a beautiful expression of community in wilderness places. 

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Reading from my book on Mother’s Day Eve at Still Cellars, in Longmont (CO).

Finding My Father

I never knew my father, and I had little hope of finding him.

My mother alone held the truth, and it was, at best, clouded by her schizophrenic filters and distortions. She was pretty sure his name was Frank, that he was a professional basketball player with whom she’d shared a blind date and a bottle of wine. Frank had no idea I was conceived, and I assumed that he would not welcome my finding him, if I ever did. I still wondered through the years: what does he look like? Do I look like him? Did I get my writing ability – or my health challenges – from him?

Throughout the years, I’ve used the internet to look for any clues, and I have come up with nothing. I searched as recently as last year, and then I gave up. By now, he would be at least in his 70s, if not older, and he could very well be dead.

In February, I began a search for more information on my mother’s family tree. In truth, I was looking for more than any family tree could tell me: I wanted to feel connected with my family roots, to understand more of where I come from and the meaning of my life. I knew on some level I would not find that on Ancestry.com but still continued my search for immigration, birth and death records.

I looked up various records for all the family I could find, and at one point, I stumbled onto something curious: someone had posted my mom’s high school graduation picture on his family tree. I didn’t recognize his name, and I sent him a note asking how he knew my mom. Since I’d found no living relatives to date, I was curious. I had no idea whether this person I contacted was family, a distant cousin perhaps, and if his being family would be a good thing. My family was an entity I needed to approach with great care, given the history of abusers and mental illness I knew of from my mother’s stories.

Several days later, I got a message back from “Larry.” He said he’d met my mom on a blind date, dated her in 1957-58, and that he’d loved her and wanted to marry her. He said it was the biggest mistake of his life that he missed that opportunity.

Honestly, at this point, I was a little intrigued but not terribly so. My mom dated a lot of men, and a few had asked to marry her. I didn’t much like my mom’s boyfriends, and I didn’t know what he could tell me that I didn’t already know. However, he said he had things to tell me about my mom, and I was about to shut down my free trial membership to Ancestry.com, so I gave him my email address, “friended” him on Facebook, and I let go of my ancestry search for the time.

Now Larry is 75 years old, typed in all caps, and didn’t write a lot of detail in his messages, so over subsequent weeks, I gathered clues about who Larry was and what his significance was to me. It came in layers, and each layer made me rethink the previous understanding I’d had of what he’d said and who he was.

First impression: Larry was one of my mom’s boyfriends in 1957-58, which would have made her 16-17 years old. He’d posted her senior picture from high school on his Ancestry page, so I assumed that confirmed that they’d been together in that time period. How sweet, I thought, and dismissed any chance that he would have much I wanted to hear.

Next layer of the archeological dig:  Larry sent me a note that he felt a shock after seeing the color of my hair. It’s a lot like his, he said. At this point, I started to feel mildly confused: who is this man, and why was he shocked about our similar hair color? They dated 10 years before my conception and birth. I let this comment slide.

Next layer, a few days later: he messaged me on FB to say I look more like his child than his own children do. Now at this point, Larry finally got my full attention. I had to ask: are you saying you think we might be related? I was under the impression that all of this information was dawning on him as slowly as it was dawning on me, or just a step ahead of me.

It took another day or two for him to respond: he’s looked at his records, and he was in Pennsylvania on business trips 1965-67, not ’57-58.

With that message showing on my computer screen, I stopped and felt my reality shift beneath me. Here’s someone who could possibly be my father. That would mean my mom’s story was either the best she knew; a mistake on her part; or a lie to keep me off the track. And any of these possibilities could be true. If she had intentionally avoided Larry and a future relationship with him, it might be his best recommendation yet: my mom married a couple of awful men, and she often missed recognizing the good people and subsequently alienated them because of her paranoia.

At this point my husband, John, and I talked about the situation. John was the first to note that no one puts a picture of an ex-girlfriend on his family tree unless he thinks they may have created progeny together. It began to dawn on me in little snippets of phone conversation and emails and Facebook messages: Larry had known about me because he visited my mom once after I was born; my mom never told him I was his, and he also didn’t pursue the line of questioning about who the father of the baby in the next room might be; and shortly after I was born, my mom moved away. By the time I was five years old, she had been married twice and changed her last name one more time for good measure. In the age of the internet, my mom would have been a challenge to locate; before the internet, finding her would have been nearly impossible.

As our conversations continued, it turned out, Larry tried to find my mom over the years. He mentioned that he searched for her and even spoke to my grandmother in the mid-‘80s. Now I realized that not only did he know Mimi had had a baby and that he’d wondered about his role in that, but that he’d also tried to find her. My story about my father shifted with each revelation he made. He was in love with my mom. He wanted to marry her. He regretted not asking her to marry him, not asking her whether he was the father. He tried to find her. He posted a picture of her on Ancestry.com, hoping.

All of this blew my assumptions about my father and about my mother’s story out of the water. A powerful current of emotion ran beneath each unfolding bit of story.  All day, I thought about this new person in my life, looked at his pictures and noted we have a strong resemblance, pondered my mother’s story and motivations for telling it and the implications for the future with this new person. I ended every day exhausted.

We ordered an home DNA test through Ancestry.com. It would tell us if we were related, and it would also show us any DNA matches to other people who might be relatives.

“I hope you’re my daughter,” he told me the very first time we spoke on the phone, the point at which we I had to pause and look at the phone. I didn’t know him yet to know if I wanted him to be my father, but I was moved that someone in the world had actually had that thought. And at this point in the conversation, I thought he was someone who was just as surprised as I was to consider we might be connected. It looks pretty obvious from this vantage, but we were still turning over the puzzle pieces on the table, let alone putting them together. To his credit, Larry was probably moving cautiously about what he revealed. He didn’t know if I was his, and he didn’t know how I would receive his speculation that he might be my father. When he looked at my pictures, he was looking to see if I was his child. With the unfolding revelations, I began to see what had been working in his mind for all these years.

I sent a quarter teaspoon of saliva to the lab for testing. My stomach flipped and flopped constantly over the next several days: was Larry my father? If he was my father, I realized, I would probably have different questions for him than if he were just my mom’s old boyfriend. Larry’s wife supported him and was excited for him; John was both excited for me and protective. Both John’s and my dreams were filled with father images and hopeful anxiety about the results. We spoke in code around Isaac: we’d found someone who might be a relative, we told him. Telling him I’d found my father would wait until we knew for sure.

Larry and I messaged one day, and he said, “I’ll claim you regardless, if that’s what you want.”

I hate to admit I was so slow on the uptake, but I was still putting the pieces together. I still hadn’t figured out that this man knew I’d been born and wondered from that moment if I was his; that he’d been waiting for 45 years to find out; that he’d wondered for nearly half a century if Mimi’s little girl was his. I still hadn’t figured out that Larry had been, on a level that is deeper than DNA, the father who’d always wanted me. He was the father who regretted not being there with my mother and with me. I have “adopted” friends as family before: “Gramma Joan”; my “sisters” Sarah and Laura Lee; Kathy “Mom,” my foster mother. I, of all people, should know that family of the heart is profoundly family, and a DNA test cannot reveal who those people should be.

I cried as my heart let it in: I have a father who loves me, regardless of the DNA test. I told him that I would be honored. I wrote back saying that I would take him as my father, if he wanted to take me as his daughter, regardless of what the test results showed. “I was already there,” he said. Yes, he was. He’d been “there” for 45 years, and I just needed a couple of weeks to wrap my head around who he was, what I meant to him, and what he meant to me. It took a little while for the story in my head to surrender to the story that was dawning in my heart.

We had several more weeks to wait for the test results to come in. But my anxiety about the test passed. It didn’t matter: I’d found my father.

My mom died in 2006, shortly after Isaac was born. I’d become an orphan at that point. I was both freed from the complications of loving a schizophrenic parent, but I was also more adrift without her.

I’ve now been given a rare gift: the opportunity to be a daughter again. The first time around, I took it for granted. It wasn’t until my mother drew her last breath that I realized it: every day of my life, my mother had breathed, and with each breath, she loved me.  There was an eerie silence in that absence of the familiar sound of her breath and her always-present attention on my life, the attention only a parent can give.

And now there’s someone else, for whatever period of time we have together, whose love has followed me from a distance and cared for me, and I have the honor of being a daughter to that someone now.

We spoke on the phone yesterday, and at the end of the call, he said, “Love you.”

Love you, too, Dad. I’m so grateful to have found you, and I’m so grateful that you were looking, too.

 When I first wrote this, the DNA results were not yet in. They have come in. I’m choosing for now not to reveal the results because they aren’t relevant one way or the other to whether Larry is family. Happy Birthday, Dad! Love you.

What do healed wounds look like?

I didn’t anticipate this part of parenting:  abuses I suffered as a child re-emerge as my own child passes through the ages that correspond with my age at the time of those abuses.

When he was three months old, I recalled my aunt’s story: she’d been visiting my mom, and my mom slapped me across the face for spitting out my food. That story made me sad before my son turned three months old. When he reached that age, however, I was newly horrified: I could not imagine slapping my three-month-old child. His body was fragile, and his spitting out of anything solid was merely a reflex (and I would not have given him food at that age because he was too young). I saw the abuse through new eyes.

Now that he is almost eight, I have a new wave of memories emerging. My mother was hospitalized for mental illness three times when I was around Isaac’s age. The first two times were for days and weeks, respectively. The last time lasted over two months. Each time she “disappeared,” my heart broke. I cried for her every night. I missed her, my pets, my toys, my home, my routine. I see my son now and can’t imagine what that kind of loss would do to him. He is learning to use a “Rainbow Loom,” where he makes bracelets for himself and his friends. I remember learning to crochet in the children’s home where I lived during my mother’s longest hospitalization. It is a poignant parallel.

What does healing look like? I used to think that healing meant I would no longer feel emotionally charged about events of the past. However, I’m discovering that this is not the case, at least not yet. This stage of healing looks like this:  I am fully present (perhaps for the first time) to the pain that was too overwhelming to experience 35 or 40 years ago. Then, I had to shut it down. Now, I can feel it. I can look the pain straight in the eyes and open my heart to it. I open my heart to that little girl who was so profoundly abandoned and abused. I hold her in my arms and let her cry it out. It was painful stuff, and she deserves a witness now who can validate her experience. Yes, Honey, that is awful stuff. I’m so sorry you had to feel such pain. I am with you now.

As I do this for myself, my heart is more open to my son. Because I don’t shut down my own pain, I don’t have to shut his down, either. In learning to be a present and compassionate witness to my own experience, I can be a present and compassionate witness to his. This is what healing looks like for me. 

The women who went before

My great grandmother was a slave, her daughter and granddaughters prostitutes. It is quite a legacy and one I have worked with in my life to heal and to turn the tide for generations that will come after.

Just over a week ago, I attended a workshop for a kind of work called “Gender Reconciliation.” It’s essentially a healing work to help the genders find compassion and common ground for healing the wounds between them. It was deep work, and I found myself reconsidering my ancestors with different eyes. Rather than seeing myself as the sole daughter of a single-parent schizophrenic, I looked back to the women who went before, and to the larger cultural (and even global) context that held us all.

The first relatives I know of were my great grandparents, John and Mary. They came from Poland. She was 17 when they married, he 27.

The family story goes that Mary’s parents sold her into indentured servitude in Poland when she was five. She remained there until she met John, moved to Ohio and then Pennsylvania, where she gave birth to five children.

Human trafficking has always bothered me immensely. I have pondered the intense pain of the wounds people have suffered throughout history and continue to suffer into the present. For some reason, I failed to put together the current situation with my reaction to it and the fact that my own great-grandmother was sold by her poor parents in order to support themselves. One little girl, over a hundred years ago, who lost her parents. She learned by living a harsh reality that she was not a treasure. She was a commodity.

She met my grandfather, the illegitimate son of the Polish ruling class. He was intelligent but frustrated: he should have had power, based on his ancestry. Instead, he was a laborer. The frustrated ruler met the slave, and they formed a match made somewhere shy of heaven.

Their youngest daughter, Rosie, grew up Roman Catholic. She was pretty, but she also saw ugliness daily in the interactions between her parents: her mother resisted having sex with her husband, and rape was a common experience in their home. So common, in fact, that she relayed the information to her own daughters later.

Rosie was pregnant at 15, giving birth at 16 to my aunt, Rose Marie. She married a man who was in love with her, not the father of her first child. She had my mother, Mimi, next, then her last child, my uncle, Jan.

Rosie told her children that she divorced Chester because he once “kicked her in the ass.” She was having none of it. She was scrappy and could be as mean as she needed to be. She divorced his ass, and she supported her children as a hairdresser and a prostitute.

She never expressed shame or embarrassment. She was glamorous, stunning even. She proudly used men for their money, and she eventually taught her daughters to do the same: both my mother and aunt prostituted for stretches of time to support themselves. My mother and aunt told me stories about their childhoods, the pedophiles in the family, their mother’s abuses and neglect, that created a deep sadness and sense of hopelessness within me. The men would use us, and the women could teach us only to use them in return. For me, it was a bleak history that could only point to a dark future.

In Gender Reconciliation work, I learned some perspectives through which to reassess some of this history.

• First, both the men and the women were deeply traumatized and victimized. The wounds were vicious, deep and frequent. Little girls were not treasured, protected, cared for. Boys and men were treated as animals: they had no higher function than what their genitals and wallets could perform. Souls and hearts were empty words, not precious aspects of our fully human selves.
• Second, I am not alone. My single story (which I’ve focused on extensively in my book and this blog) is part of a global context. There are many others in the world like Mary, Rosie, Mimi, Rose Marie and myself. I may end the cycle of abuse for my family line, but there is more work to be done.
• Third, there is hope. Gender Reconciliation exists, and it is a growing hope that the abuses can stop. It is possible that the mutual using can stop, that we can hear the pain each gender experiences. We can change because our stories change us. We can no longer abuse the human being who has become a sacred person in our eyes.
• And lastly, what I have learned on a very personal level is that my power and my healing come from fully owning and being a compassionate witness to my own story and for letting all of it become the material from which I contribute to the solution. I will continue to write. I will continue to listen. I will continue to feel all of the pain because, in allowing myself to feel the pain, I am also free to feel the joy of being alive and no longer being a slave to my family history.

For more information on Gender Reconciliation, go to http://www.genderreconciliationinternational.org.